The thesis
NZB indexers like NZBGeek delivered organized, parsed, high-def releases — but to roughly 200,000 power users globally, behind invite-only communities and paywalls. A niche craft for the few who knew.
Telegram channels are where the modern audience already is — 950M+ users, communities for every language, niche, and interest, with files retained indefinitely. Yet none of it plugs into Sonarr / Radarr workflows that self-hosters already run. Sonarr and Radarr live in a Usenet-shaped tooling world while a billion-user content layer sits beside them, tooling-orphaned.
BitTorrent is where most people end up by default — and where ISP DMCA notices and DPI throttling happen.
tgarr takes Telegram's reach + safety profile and gives it the *arr-stack ergonomics that NZB indexers earned over a decade.
How tgarr compares
| tgarr | BitTorrent | PT | NZB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IP exposed to peers | no | yes | yes | no |
| ISP DPI sees content | no | yes | w/o VPN | no |
| DMCA letters / strikes | none | common | rare | none |
| Ratio requirement | no | n/a | forever | no |
| Invite gate | no | no | years | often |
| File retention | permanent | dies | usually | 5000+ days |
| Mass-user accessible | 950M Telegram | tech only | tech only | <200K |
| Cost | free | free | free* | $10-80/yr |
How it works
- Pyrogram-based crawler listens to your subscribed Telegram channels via MTProto
- Parses filenames + captions into structured release records (PostgreSQL + Meilisearch)
- Exposes a Newznab XML API — Sonarr/Radarr see it as a regular indexer
- On grab, MTProto fetches the file and drops it in your *arr completed folder
Runs on
Synology · CasaOS · Unraid · TrueNAS Scale · QNAP · Portainer · plain Docker · Kubernetes · any Linux. Multi-arch images for amd64 + arm64.
Status
In active development. Public alpha targeted end of week.