channelindex-mcp

MCP server for public Telegram channels. Gives an agent a channel's real profile — subscribers, description, creation date, verification and scam flags, how often it posts — and the channels Telegram itself considers similar to it.

No phone number, no session file, no MTProto client to keep alive. An API key and a Node runtime.

Install

npx channelindex-mcp

Claude Desktop / Claude Code / any MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "channelindex": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "channelindex-mcp"],
      "env": { "TELEGRAM_API_KEY": "your-rapidapi-key" }
    }
  }
}

Get a key at rapidapi.com/starnikovoleg/api/telegram155. There is a free tier and no card.

Tools

telegram_channel

A channel's profile: title, description, exact subscriber count, creation date, Telegram's own verification and scam flags, and posting cadence.

The cadence is the part most directories leave out, and it is usually the answer to the question being asked. A channel with 200,000 subscribers and nothing published in fourteen months looks identical to a live one in every listing that reports only follower counts.

@durov — Du rov's Channel
Subscribers   1,400,000
Created       2017-02-15
Last post     2026-08-29
Posting rate  0.4 posts/day over the last 30

telegram_similar_channels

The channels Telegram recommends alongside a given one — its own topical judgement rather than a keyword match, so it returns channels that share an audience without sharing vocabulary.

This is how you find channels whose names you do not already know: start from one you do and walk outward. Two rounds of expansion from a few dozen seeds reaches several thousand channels.

Set enrich: true to fetch exact subscriber counts for each result.

telegram_search_channels

Telegram's global search over public channels and groups. Use it to find a starting point; use telegram_similar_channels to expand it.

Output

Markdown by default — what a model reads without a parsing step. Pass format: "json" for the raw API response when you are piping into code.

Scope

Public channel metadata only. Message contents, member lists, and private groups are outside what this reads and outside what it will return.

Cost

Tools call the REST endpoints directly rather than proxying a remote MCP endpoint. RapidAPI bills per request, so this arrangement means initialize and tools/list are free: you pay for lookups, not handshakes.

telegram_channel costs three calls with cadence on, two with cadence: false. telegram_similar_channels costs two, plus one per result when enrich: true (capped at 12).

Environment

Related

ChannelIndex publishes a weekly measured corpus built on the same API: channel directories by topic, the recommendation graph inverted into "who recommends this channel", and how those numbers move week to week.

MIT.