Introducing Hosting Bot: Launch Your ICP D-Apps in Minutes – All From Telegram

Developers
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We built HostyBot to make decentralized hosting dead simple.

  • Telegram-based
  • No blockchain experience required
  • $1 gets you a live canister
  • /buy, /create, /upload — all managed inside Telegram
  • Built-in /faucet to test for free

Use it to deploy:

  • Telegram Mini Apps as Mini D-Apps
  • Frontend websites with no backend
  • Lightweight tools & experiments

We’d love early adopter feedback and suggestions from the Dfinity dev community.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Try it out: https://hostybot.com

Happy to answer questions and hear feedback!

Thanks!

— The HostyBot Team :hammer_and_wrench:

For more information, please check out the Notion page: Your connected workspace for wiki, docs & projects | Notion

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You should bring this functionality to an OpenChat bot :robot:

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Anyone who can help with OpenChat bots?

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Yes! What do you need?

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are you aware of this repo? GitHub - open-chat-labs/open-chat-bots: SDKs for building Bots for OpenChat with examples

there is also this playlist that gives some intros into the bot framework: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJLvShq_XwmjfreutMvRwS6OATyJ78Utz&si=-zXlEnyXCKH3C6za

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Please feel free to post here, but you can also get support from the OC core dev team in our dedicated community: OpenChat

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I need someone to write the OpenChat from start to end :joy: as I don’t have the resources.

It would certainly be very nice to see an OpenChat doing the same thing. But I am wondering what the purpose is. The goal of a Telegram bot is attract new users to the IC by introducing frontend hosting to them. There is a large user base and we make it easy for them by using Telegram as a payment rail. Those users may have tokens, especially USDT, in their Telegram wallet or TON Space. They can get started with a canister without touching ICP or cycles.

OpenChat users are are completely different group. They already have ICP native tokens. And I don’t see the benefit of a bot interface either. It would be easier to manage your canisters from a web app. Kind of a GUI version of dfx where you log in with II.

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I agree it makes absolutely (more) sense to run this on TG to potentially attract a new audience for hosting websites on ICP.

however, I would still love to see somebody also building this on OC :slight_smile:

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Hostybot was able to lower the price for a new asset canister to 0.6 TC.

Previously, 0.8 TC was required to create a new canister and to install the asset canister into it. The new asset canister had an initial balance of 0.3 TC.

We found a way to reduce this to 0.6 TC which leaves the asset canister with an initial balance of 0.1 TC. For context, what can be done with a balance of 0.1 TC? You cannot upgrade the canister but you don’t need to because the asset canister is already installed. All you need to do is call the canister to upload assets. 0.1 TC allows you to host a 10 MB frontend for 1 year. This includes an initial upload of 1k files of 10 kB each plus one re-upload, i.e. a change of all files, at some time during the year.

We believe that reducing the upfront cost as much as possible, even if only by 30 cents, is important to attract first time users. And hosting 10 MB for one year is enough for experimentation. The canister can easily be topped up later from within the Telegram chat when the user needs it.

Note that dfx deploy, the command used for uploading assets, may decide to upgrade the asset canister code on top of uploading assets into it. That upgrade will fail with a low balance. Hence the --no-asset-upgrade is needed. You should always upload your assets with the command

dfx deploy --ic <canister name> --no-asset-upgrade

That will prevent any unnecessary canister upgrades. If you absolutely want dfx to upgrade the asset canister then run it without the option but top up the canister to at least 0.31 TC before.

For more context: The dfx canister create command by default uses 3.5 TC and leaves an initial balance of 3 TC in the new canister. That can be reduced with the --with-cycles argument.

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