I run a Telegram Stars payment bot for $0/month forever — on GitHub Actions, not a server

说明与用途

在 GitHub Actions 上运行的 Telegram Stars 机器人通过 6 小时作业和推送重试策略，实现零成本的持续预结账响应。

问题

Telegram requires answerPreCheckoutQuery within 10 seconds of every payment attempt, so a bot must be always‑on to respond, normally incurring hosting costs.

结果

Near‑continuous coverage of Telegram pre‑checkout queries for $0/month, with a robust push‑retry mechanism to prevent duplicate deliveries.

工作流

• 1. Configure a GitHub Actions workflow with a cron schedule of every 6 hours and a concurrency group named telegram-stars-bot.
• 2. In each run, long‑poll Telegram’s getUpdates for ~5h50m to stay within the 6‑hour job limit.
• 3. Process updates, answerPreCheckoutQuery, and deliver successful_payment messages.
• 4. Commit state.json (offset) and fulfilled.json (dedup list) back to the main branch as the last step.
• 5. If the push fails, retry up to five times with a rebase to avoid losing progress.

证据

Telegram requires answerPreCheckoutQuery within 10 seconds of every payment attempt — there's no auto‑approve fallback.

来源

A single GitHub Actions job can run up to 6 hours.

来源

If anything else pushes to main during that ~5h50m window, the push fails with a plain ! [rejected] (fetch first).

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