// the take
A Telegram front-end for OpenAI and Anthropic models: you run it with your own API keys and get a chat bot with streaming replies, vision, voice transcription, image generation, and a set of canned system-prompt 'modes'. Aimed at people who want ChatGPT/Claude in Telegram without per-seat subscription limits, not at anyone building a product on top of it.
Model catalog is config-driven (models.yml) — adding or swapping a model is a YAML edit, not a code change, which is the right call for a project that will otherwise churn every time a provider ships a new model. It wires up the genuinely useful stuff (word-by-word streaming to Telegram, vision input, Whisper voice transcription, gpt-image-1 generation) rather than just being a thin chat wrapper. Deployment is a single docker-compose up with one MongoDB dependency, so there's no infra to design around.
The header image in this README still points at karfly/chatgpt_telegram_bot's raw GitHub URL while this repo is published as father-bot/chatgpt_telegram_bot and spends real estate promoting its own hosted bot (@jadvebot), a separate jadve.com site, and a donation leaderboard — that's a fork riding on the original project's star count and README rather than a maintained independent project, and it's unclear whether upstream fixes (security or otherwise) make it back in. Claude and GPT-5.5 access goes through OpenRouter as a middleman, adding a third party, extra latency, and another point where keys and traffic are exposed, on top of your own OpenAI key. There's no per-user spend cap — 'no request limits' is marketed as a feature, but a single allowed user (or a leaked bot token) can run an unbounded API bill with only a manual /balance check to notice. Secrets (OpenAI, OpenRouter, Telegram token) live in a plain config.yml with no secrets-manager story, and access control is just a username allowlist, so anyone who can read the host's filesystem gets everything.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →