Plans, tiers and limits
The Subscriber Exchange is fully usable on the Free plan. Paid Onflow Ads plans raise your capacity, sharpen your targeting, move you up the dispatch queue, and increase what your hosting earns. They never buy a way around any host's protections or the exchange's rules, and they do not move you up the review queue — only the paid Priority Review add-on does that.
One rule every rung shares: an ad runs only while the exchange holds at least as many eligible channels as the placements your plan schedules for it in a cycle (the "Placements per 30-day cycle" row below, after your reliability and any boost). A bigger plan reaches more channels — and needs a bigger pool before its ad starts. A submit the pool cannot carry is refused with nothing charged and you are told when it can; an approved ad whose pool later falls short is paused and resumes on its own. Enrolling channels is never limited by this. See Running ads.
Your current plan and its exact numbers are always shown on the exchange page itself. Upgrade options live at https://onflowads.com/pricing.
The ladder
Six tiers, in order: Free, Lite, Plus, Elite, Master, Ultimate. Each rung keeps everything the rung below it has and adds to it, so nothing is traded away by moving up.
Capacity by tier
| Free | Lite | Plus | Elite | Master | Ultimate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enrolled channels | 5 | 10 | 25 | 50 | 100 | 250 |
| Ads running at once | 2 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 18 | 25 |
| Placements per 30-day cycle | 7 | 9 | 11 | 13 | 15 | 18 |
| Distinct channels reached per week | about 2 | about 2 | about 3 | about 3 | about 4 | about 4 |
| Most placements one campaign can total, with the largest delivery boost | 13 | 15 | 17 | 19 | 21 | 24 |
Each placement is a different channel — the same campaign is never placed twice in one channel in a cycle — so the placement count is a genuine count of distinct audiences.
Whatever the plan, and whatever is bought, no single campaign exceeds 24 placements per cycle. That is the hard ceiling that keeps the pool fair for everyone. A paid delivery boost fits into the headroom under it or is refused outright.
Features by tier
| Free | Lite | Plus | Elite | Master | Ultimate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ads your channels host run without the attribution line | — | — | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Link buttons per post | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| Coloured link buttons | — | — | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Private Telegram links | — | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor blocklist size | 0 | 0 | 50 | 100 | 200 | 500 |
| Grace (forgiven accidental early removals per cycle) | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Credit earn rate | 1.0x | 1.1x | 1.2x | 1.5x | 1.7x | 2.0x |
| Credits per completed placement hosted | 10 | 11 | 12 | 15 | 17 | 20 |
| Dispatch priority | 0 | +5 | +10 | +15 | +20 | +25 |
| Lookalike matching | — | — | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Custom matcher weights | — | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Delivery Floor make-good | — | — | — | — | — | Yes |
Higher tiers also sample from a progressively tighter, better-matched slice of the eligible pool — the whole pool on Free, the best-matching half on Plus, the best fifth on Ultimate.
"Ads your channels host run without the attribution line" is the only row in this table that is not about your own campaigns. From Plus upward, ads other members place in your channels post without the advertisement via onflowads.com line. It does nothing for the ads you run: those carry the line or not according to each host's plan, decided one placement at a time. Nobody can buy a clean placement in somebody else's feed. See Hosting ads.
The Referral Premium status earned through referrals sits at the same level as Free for everything on this page: no link buttons, no coloured buttons, no private links, and the attribution line stays on ads your channels host. It never satisfies a gate that names a paid plan.
Every eligible channel stays reachable on every tier, including Free. A higher tier is dispatched sooner when the pool is contended and matched more sharply within it. It is never given access to channels a lower tier cannot reach.
This table used to carry a Priority review queue row from Lite upward. Nothing in the exchange ever acted on it, so it has been removed rather than left to promise a benefit that did not exist. The one control that really does move a campaign up the moderation queue is the Priority Review add-on — $2, one campaign, available on every plan including Free. See Delivery boosts.
Every campaign row shows the same tiles — Placements, Live now, Views, Taps, Joins and Match — plus the per-button click line. There is no export button anywhere on the exchange page and no per-placement breakdown at any price, because a per-placement view would identify the hosting channels. Platform-wide analytics benefits are documented in the Analytics section, not here.
A read-only Subscriber Exchange API used to sit on Elite and above. It has been withdrawn, so no rung on this ladder buys programmatic access to the exchange — everything here happens on the exchange page. The Boost developer API is a different product and is unaffected; its ceilings are in Limits and caps.
Targeting by tier
Topic and language matching are free for everyone — a badly matched placement wastes the host's audience too, so basic relevance is never paywalled. Higher tiers add precision.
| Tier | Targeting dimensions |
|---|---|
| Free | Topic, language |
| Lite | Plus country and a scheduled start |
| Plus and Elite | Plus audience-size band, day-parting and the competitor blocklist |
| Master | Plus lookalike — favour hosts resembling your best past placements |
| Ultimate | Plus custom matcher weights — a per-campaign audience-size slider and a topic-adjacency switch |
Where a control is not included, the form hides it and a note names the tier that unlocks it. Read Targeting before buying a plan for a particular filter — each one narrows the pool as well as sharpening it, and the language and country filters narrow it very hard.
What the tiers explicitly do not change
- Reliability rules apply equally. Your reliability score scales every campaign's actual placements. No tier buys out of it, and it bites bought placements as hard as free ones.
- Host protections always win. Level ceilings, the weekly limit, the 20-hour gap, the 72-hour pair cooldown, review-before-post, refusals and per-cycle uniqueness bind every ad, whatever was paid.
- The 24-hour hold is universal. Every placement stays up its full term, on every tier.
- Reciprocity is universal. You cannot run an ad on any tier without an enrolled channel hosting others' ads in return.
- Host veto is universal. Refusing an ad penalty-free is available on every plan, Free included.
How a tier attaches to a campaign
Your tier is frozen onto the campaign at submit time, and the scheduler reads that for the whole cycle.
- If your subscription lapses on day 20 of a cycle, a running campaign keeps the allowance you paid for. Clawing reach back mid-flight would make a paid tier untrustworthy for exactly the campaigns people care most about.
- New submissions after a lapse use your new, lower entitlements.
- A lapsed subscription never takes away what you have. Existing enrolled channels are never removed — you are only blocked from adding more.
- Upgrading mid-cycle does not retroactively enlarge a running campaign. It applies to what you submit next.
The freeze covers placements per cycle and the targeting dimensions your campaign may use. It does not cover the advertisement via onflowads.com line — that is not yours to freeze. It is decided at send time from the live plan of whichever channel is about to carry the placement, so the same campaign can run clean in one channel and carry the line in the next, and a host who upgrades or lapses changes the answer mid-cycle. Older documentation described this as part of the freeze; it is not.
Limits that apply to everyone
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Cycle length | 30 days |
| How long each placement stays up | 24 hours |
| Gap between two placements in one channel | at least 20 hours |
| Gap before the same advertiser returns to one channel | 72 hours |
| Ads one channel is asked to carry per rolling week | 4 by default |
| Maximum placements for any one campaign per cycle | 24 |
| Post text | 4,063 characters, or 991 with media attached. Telegram's own caps are 4,096 and 1,024; the exchange holds 33 of them back on every plan for the attribution line, because it cannot know which channel will host the ad. The on-screen counter counts against the lower number |
| Link buttons | up to 4, and how many you get is a plan benefit. Labels 1–48 characters, no line breaks. A colour — blue, green or red, one per button — from Plus up |
| Link destinations | Public Telegram links on every plan; private Telegram invite links from Lite; anything else needs the $1 External Links add-on |
| Media | images up to 10 MB, video up to 50 MB |
| Content levels | 1 to 5, and levels 3 to 5 require the host's explicit opt-in |
| Topics | 40, one per ad, up to 5 per channel |
| Values per language or country filter | 12 |
| Scheduled start | within the next 90 days |
| Reliability floor for the exchange | 4.0 out of 10 by default |
The exchange's minimum reliability and its minimum-subscriber floor for enrolment are both admin-configurable. The reliability floor ships at 4.0 and the subscriber floor at 1,000, but neither is a constant — the number quoted on your own exchange page and in your own error messages is the authoritative one.
Frequently asked
Which tier should I be on?
If you host a lot and advertise a little, the credit rate and grace allowance matter most — Elite is where both jump. If you advertise hard, the placements per cycle and the live-ad limit matter most. If you need the exchange to stand behind delivery, that is Ultimate and its Delivery Floor.
Does a paid tier get my ad approved faster?
No. Your subscription does not move a campaign up the review queue — the only thing that does is the paid Priority Review add-on, which flags the moderation card so a reviewer picks it up first. It is a $2 one-off on a single campaign and every tier can buy it, free included — see Delivery boosts. Neither the plan nor the add-on changes the decision, and no review deadline is enforced anywhere.
I upgraded. When do the new numbers apply?
Immediately for anything you do next — new campaigns, new channels, and the credit rate on placements that complete from now on. Campaigns already running keep the tier they were submitted with.
Can I use a delivery boost instead of upgrading?
For a one-off push, yes — any tier can buy one for a single campaign. A subscription is better value if you run campaigns continuously, and it is the only way to raise your channel limit, your live-ad limit, your targeting menu and your credit rate.
Does a paid plan protect me from penalties?
No. Reliability rules bite paid plans exactly as hard as free ones. Paid plans do include grace — a number of accidental early removals forgiven per cycle — which never covers demoting or removing the bot.
Related
- Targeting — what each paid targeting dimension actually does.
- Delivery boosts — the one-off purchase that works on every plan.
- Rules and fair play — the reliability ladder and the strike economy.