Marketplace entry gates
Your plan decides how much you may do. A separate set of numbers decides whether you may take part at all. They are the entry gates: a minimum subscriber count on a channel, and a minimum reliability score on the account behind it.
These are not on the ladder. No rung raises them, lowers them or exempts you, and paying more does not open a door a low score closed. This page explains what each gate is, where it bites, and what the refusal says.
Plus plan · Advertiser. Your reliability page is where the floors that apply to you are quoted live, alongside the score they are compared against. Start here when a gate refuses you.
The gates
| Gate | Ships as | What it checks |
|---|---|---|
| Paid Promotions minimum subscribers | 1,000 | The channel you are enlisting |
| Paid Promotions reliability floor | 4.0 / 10 | Your account, before you start a deal |
| Cross-Promotion reliability floor | 5.0 / 10 | Your account, before you start or join a campaign |
| Subscriber Exchange reliability floor | 4.0 / 10 | Your account, on every exchange action |
| Subscriber Exchange minimum subscribers | 1,000 | The channel you are enrolling as a host |
| Cross-Promotion minimum subscribers | Off | The channel you are attaching, when an operator turns it on |
Cross-Promotion carries the strictest reliability bar on the platform. That is deliberate: a cross-promotion is a promise between two members with no escrow between them, so the community bar sits higher than the marketplace one.
An operator can retune any of them from the admin settings panel without a deploy. The values above are what the platform ships with and what you get if nothing has been changed — but the number quoted in a refusal message is always the live one, and it can move under you. Read the message, not this table, when something is refused.
Paid Promotions and the Subscriber Exchange both ask for 1,000 subscribers before a channel can be listed or enrolled: a listing is something an advertiser pays real money against, and an exchange host is a channel other members' ads run in. The Cross-Promotion subscriber floor ships at zero, which means no gate at all — any channel size may take part. It exists so an operator can turn it on if the pool ever needs it.
Paid Promotions: the 1,000-subscriber floor
Before a channel can join the Paid Promotions pool it has to be a public Telegram channel whose subscriber count can be read, and that count has to clear the floor.
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "Paid Promotions channels need at least 1,000 subscribers. This channel has 412." | The channel is below the live floor | Grow the channel, or list a different one. Nothing about your plan changes this |
| "That channel isn't public, or it doesn't exist. Only public Telegram channels can join the Paid Promotions pool." | The handle could not be resolved as a public channel | Make the channel public, or check the handle |
| "We couldn't read this channel's subscriber count — please try again in a moment." | The count could not be fetched right now | Retry shortly. The gate refuses rather than guessing, so an unreadable count is never waved through |
| "We couldn't reach Telegram from our server right now. Please try again in a moment." | A transient failure talking to Telegram | Retry shortly |
The floor is checked when the listing is created, against the count read at that moment, and again when the listing is submitted for review.
Subscriber Exchange: the same 1,000-subscriber floor
A channel enrolled as an exchange host has to clear the same bar. You are told as soon as the bot is an administrator of the channel — when you press the button to check the bot is in place, before you are asked to fix any of its rights — and the floor is checked again, against a fresh count, when the channel is enrolled.
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "The Subscriber Exchange needs channels with at least 1,000 subscribers. This channel has 640." | The channel is below the live floor | Grow the channel, or enrol a different one. Nothing about your plan changes this |
| "We couldn't read this channel's subscriber count — please try again in a moment." | The count could not be fetched right now | Retry shortly. An unreadable count is never waved through |
A channel already enrolled is not removed if its count later dips below the floor; the floor decides who may start. A channel you already have in the exchange can still go through Add a channel again to change its level ceiling, or to bring it back after a pause, whatever its count is now.
The reliability floors
Reliability is one score out of 10 per account, shared by every product. Three separate floors read it.
Where each one bites.
- Paid Promotions — checked before you start a deal: checkout, accepting an offer, auto-accept and bidding.
- Cross-Promotion — checked before you create, accept or join a campaign, and before applying through discovery.
- The Subscriber Exchange — checked on exchange actions, alongside a separate requirement that your Telegram account is linked.
What a refusal says.
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Paid Promotions needs a reliability score of at least 4/10 — yours is 3.2/10. Complete clean deals to raise it — and a clean streak also recovers it over time on its own. See how it works on your reliability page." | You are below the Paid Promotions floor |
| "Cross-Promotion needs a reliability score of at least 5/10 — yours is 4.4/10. Complete clean deals to raise it — and a clean streak also recovers it over time on its own. See how it works on your reliability page." | You are below the stricter Cross-Promotion floor |
| "The Subscriber Exchange needs a reliability score of at least 4/10 — yours is 3.6/10. Honour your placements to earn it back." | You are below the exchange floor |
| "Your account is under review while an open fraud concern is resolved. You can finish anything already in progress, but can't start a new deal until it's cleared — see your reliability page." | A wallet freeze or an open fraud concern is blocking new deals, whatever your score |
| "Connect your Telegram account to use the exchange." | The exchange needs a linked Telegram account before any gate is even reached |
The floors gate the start of something: a new booking, a new campaign, a new exchange ad. Anything already in flight runs to completion. An account under review can still deliver, confirm and get paid on the deals it already has.
You do not have to buy or ask your way back above a floor. Completing deals cleanly raises the score, and a run without incidents also recovers it over time by itself. The reliability page shows the events that moved it and what it would take to clear each floor.
Why a plan does not help
Three things follow from these gates being separate from the ladder, and all three come up in support conversations:
- Upgrading does not clear a floor. An Ultimate account below 4.0 is refused by Paid Promotions exactly like a Free one. The ladder buys capacity; the floors are about trust.
- The floors are the same for everyone. There is no rung with a lower bar and no way to buy an exemption. In rare cases Onflow Ads itself sets a different subscriber floor for one member's channels — always for a recorded reason, and always for a limited time (a year at most). It cannot be bought, and no plan includes it.
- They are checked live. The gate reads the current value each time, so an operator's change reaches you on your very next action rather than at your next renewal.
How a change reaches the Telegram bot
The website owns these values. When an operator saves one, it is written to the website's own store and mirrored into the database both surfaces share, because the Telegram bot cannot see the website's store directly. The bot reads the mirrored value and falls back to its own shipped constant if it is missing.
The practical consequence: a change takes roughly a minute to be visible in the bot, and during that minute the two surfaces can quote different numbers. If a refusal in the bot names a figure the website does not, wait a moment and retry.
If a value cannot be read at all, the gate uses the shipped constant rather than blocking. A configuration hiccup can never lock the whole platform out of a marketplace — the worst case is that a recent change has not taken effect yet.
Two related numbers on the same panel
The same admin panel also carries two figures that belong to the Referral Programme rather than to any gate: the commission a referrer earns on every top-up the person they referred pays (ships at 5%), and how long an unconverted referral click stays attributable (ships at 90 days). They are runtime-editable in exactly the same way, and they are documented with the programme at onflowads.com/account/referrals.
Frequently asked
My channel has 900 subscribers. Can I list it if I pay?
No. The subscriber floor is not a plan feature and no tier changes it. Grow the channel or list a different one.
Does the Subscriber Exchange have a subscriber minimum?
Yes: 1,000 subscribers, the same as Paid Promotions. The refusal names the live number, which an operator can change for everybody.
Why is Cross-Promotion stricter than Paid Promotions?
There is no escrow between two members in a cross-promotion, so the only protection is that both sides have a record of keeping their word. The bar is set higher for that reason.
My score dropped and I was mid-campaign. What happens?
Nothing to that campaign. Floors are checked when you start something, not while it runs.
Where do I see my own score and the floors that apply to me?
On your reliability page, which quotes the live floors next to your current score.
Related
- Comparing the tiers — what your plan does control.
- Where tier limits appear — the limits that are on the ladder.
- Plans FAQ and troubleshooting — every plan and limit message, explained.
- Testing accounts — the one flag that changes which tier an account resolves as.