AutoFlow Labs Premium is a paid Telegram community offering exclusive automation resources, workflows, and priority support to freelancers and agency owners. They needed a seamless way to monetize their community without the overhead of manual payment tracking, access management, and renewal follow-ups. We built an intelligent Telegram bot integrated with Paystack payments and Airtable that handles the complete subscription lifecycle from signup through payment processing, access provisioning, renewal reminders, and automatic expiration management, creating a self-service membership experience that runs entirely on autopilot.
AutoFlow Labs was manually managing community memberships through a messy combination of spreadsheets, manual Telegram group invites, and payment tracking across multiple channels. When someone wanted to join, team members had to manually verify payment screenshots, add them to the private Telegram group, record their subscription end date in a Google Sheet, set calendar reminders for renewal follow-ups, and manually remove expired members. This process consumed 10-15 hours weekly, led to payment disputes when records didn't match, created bad member experiences with delayed access after payment, resulted in lost revenue when renewal reminders were missed, and made it impossible to offer flexible subscription options. The team needed a way to scale the community without hiring dedicated staff to handle membership operations, and they wanted members to have a smooth self-service experience from discovery through renewal.
Build a complete end-to-end subscription management system accessible entirely through Telegram that could handle new member signups with instant payment link generation, Paystack payment processing with automatic verification, immediate Telegram group access provisioning after successful payment, subscription lifecycle tracking in Airtable with accurate expiration dates, automated renewal reminders sent via Telegram and email at 2 days and 1 day before expiry, automatic member removal from the group when subscriptions lapse, payment retry mechanisms for failed transactions, multiple subscription tier support for monthly and quarterly plans, and comprehensive admin notifications for all membership events. The system needed to be reliable enough to run unsupervised 24/7, intelligent enough to handle edge cases like duplicate payments or manual interventions, and user-friendly enough that members never needed to contact support for routine subscription tasks.
We developed a multi-workflow Telegram bot system built entirely in n8n that manages the complete subscription lifecycle. We configured Telegram webhook triggers to capture all bot interactions, including slash commands for /plans, /status, and /renew, callback queries from inline button selections, and text messages for email collection. The member registration flow searches Airtable for existing records, creates new member entries with "new" status for first-time users, or updates existing member information with current chat IDs and usernames. We built intelligent routing logic that presents subscription plan options only after capturing the member's email address, validates email format before accepting input, and stores it for payment receipts and notifications. The payment initiation system generates dynamic Paystack payment links with embedded metadata, including telegram_id, plan_code, duration_days, and transaction type, calculates correct amounts in kobo for monthly plans at 25,000 NGN and quarterly plans at 70,000 NGN, and updates Airtable with pending payment references for tracking. We configured Paystack webhook handlers to receive charges. success events, extract payment metadata to identify the member, calculate subscription start and end dates in Lagos timezone, update member status to "active" with precise expiration timestamps, generate single-use Telegram invite links restricted to one member, and send formatted welcome messages with join buttons and subscription details. The subscription monitor runs on a daily schedule at 9am Lagos time, queries all active members from Airtable, calculates days remaining until expiration for each subscription, and triggers different actions based on time-to-expiry. For members with 2 days remaining, the system checks if they've already been notified, creates new Paystack payment links for renewal, sends Telegram messages with renewal buttons, sends professional HTML email reminders with subscription details, and updates the "Notified 2 Days" flag in Airtable. For members with 1 day remaining, we implemented an escalated reminder system with urgent messaging, second payment link generation, both Telegram and email notifications, and the "Notified 1 Day" flag update. For expired members on day zero, the workflow automatically kicks them from the Telegram group using the Telegram API, sends them a notification about removal with resubscribe options, updates their status to "removed" in Airtable, and notifies admins about the automatic removal. We built payment retry mechanisms that capture failed transactions from Paystack webhooks, generate fresh payment links with updated metadata referencing the original attempt, and send them back to members with retry instructions. The system includes comprehensive admin notifications sent to a private Telegram channel for every new payment received, every renewal reminder sent, and every member removed due to expiration. We implemented email validation that requires a properly formatted email before allowing plan selection, prevents subscription without email for receipt delivery, and stores emails for both payment confirmations and renewal reminders. Finally, we documented the complete system with a workflow diagram and trained the AutoFlow Labs team on monitoring the Airtable dashboard, handling edge cases that require manual intervention, and adjusting subscription pricing or durations as needed.
