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Scheduled broadcast in a Telegram bot: how to schedule, stop and get the time right

November 5, 2026 · Command CHBT · Broadcasts, Telegram

It is handy to prepare a promotion on Friday afternoon and send it on Saturday at 10 a.m., when people wake up and scroll their phones. For this, a CHBT broadcast has a Scheduled start field. It is simple, but it has features worth knowing in advance: which clock the time is counted by, what happens to customers in another time zone, what is fixed at creation and what at sending, and how to stop a broadcast if you change your mind.

How to schedule a broadcast

Open the bot → Broadcasts → New broadcast.
Fill in Name — it is only for you, customers do not see it.
Write the Message text. Buttons under the field insert the variables {{name}}, {{phone}} and {{email}}.
In the To field, enter comma-separated tags. An empty field means all project contacts in Telegram, MAX and VK.
In the Scheduled start field, choose a date and time.
Press Create a broadcast.

The broadcast appears in the list with the Scheduled status and a Starts line with the date and time. When the time comes, the status changes to Sending, and after sending — to Sent with delivery counters.

If the Scheduled start field is left empty, the broadcast starts as soon as it is created. The field is optional — it is the “now or later” switch.

Which clock the time is counted by

The key thing to know: the time zone is not chosen in the form. CHBT interprets the time you entered in Scheduled start by its server clock, and the Starts line in the list shows it the same way.

So after creating your first scheduled broadcast, compare the Starts line with what you entered and with your own clock. If you work in another time zone, keep the difference in mind and enter the time with a correction.

The second consequence: the broadcast goes to everyone at the same moment. A customer in Moscow and a customer in Novosibirsk receive the message simultaneously — for one it is 10 a.m., for the other 2 p.m. If that matters, split the audience by time zone as described below.

Start accuracy

The scheduler checks scheduled broadcasts once a minute. So the start happens not in the same second but within a minute after the set time. For a promotion this is unnoticeable; if you need “exactly at 12:00:00” precision — for example, a sales start with limited quantity — allow a minute of margin and write “starts at 12:00” in the text rather than “right now”.

Then the broadcast goes one message at a time with a short pause — no faster than 20 a second, and in practice slower, because CHBT waits for the messenger’s response to each message. A thousand recipients take a minute or two. The last ones in the list get the message later than the first, and that is normal.

If you enter a date in the past, the broadcast will not wait: it goes out immediately, as if the field were empty. Check the date before pressing Create a broadcast — especially after midnight, when it is easy to get the day wrong.

What is fixed immediately and what at sending

What	When it is determined
Message text	At creation — it cannot be changed later
The list of tags in To	At creation
Who gets the broadcast	At sending — by the tags contacts will have then
Name, phone, e-mail in the text	At sending — from the contact card
Which bot sends the message	At sending — the bot the contact last wrote to

In practice this is convenient: if you scheduled a broadcast for the webinar tag for the morning, and in the evening ten more people got this tag through the registration flow, they will receive the message too. The reverse is also true: whoever unsubscribed and lost the tag before the start will not get the broadcast.

How to change or cancel a scheduled broadcast

A created broadcast cannot be edited — neither the text, nor the time, nor the tags. If something needs changing:

Press Stop on the scheduled broadcast’s card and confirm. The status becomes Stopped, and the broadcast will not go out.
Create a new broadcast with the corrections.

Stop also works on the fly: a broadcast with the Sending status has the button too. Sending is interrupted before the next message; already delivered messages are not recalled.

Broadcasts can be created and stopped by the project owner and admin. An operator sees the section but has no form — so an accidental click by a support agent will not send a promotion to the whole base.

Time zones: split the audience with tags

If customers live in different time zones and delivery time matters, make one broadcast per zone:

Find out the customer’s zone. The simplest way is in a flow: the question “Which city are you from?” with buttons “Moscow and west”, “Urals”, “Siberia”, “Far East”.
On each button — Action → Add a tag: tz-msk, tz-urals and so on.
For a promotion, create several broadcasts with the same text: in To — the zone tag, in Scheduled start — 10:00 local time converted to the server clock.

If you already collect the city in a questionnaire, the tag can be set right after the answer — with a Condition block on the city variable. A broadcast selects recipients by “OR”: a contact with any of the tags in To gets it, so one contact with two zone tags gets both broadcasts — make sure each person has one zone tag.

Which time to choose

Not at night. A bot message arrives as a regular message with a notification. A broadcast at 11:30 p.m. annoys people and raises the chance they block the bot — and someone who blocked the bot will not get anything again.
Morning and lunchtime suit promotions and news, a weekday evening — content and useful materials.
An event reminder — a few hours before it, not late the evening before.
Weekends are good for B2C and bad for B2B.

Only a comparison will show the best time for your base. Send two similar broadcasts at different times to different segments and see after which one more people sent the bot the keyword from the text or tapped the link. How to compare fairly — in the article on split testing in a chatbot.

A scheduled broadcast or a pause in a flow

CHBT has two “send later” tools, and they should not be confused:

A scheduled broadcast — one message to everyone with a tag at a specific date and time. Suits promotions, news, announcements and reminders about a shared event.
The Pause block in a flow — a message to each customer a set time after their action: an hour after a request, a day after downloading a material. Each customer has their own countdown.

If you need “send the second message three days after subscribing”, that is not a broadcast but a chain in a flow — explained in the article on trigger chains. There are no recurring scheduled broadcasts (“every Monday”) in CHBT: each broadcast is created separately.

Example: a webinar announcement in three broadcasts

Say the webinar is on Thursday at 7 p.m., and registration goes through the bot: the flow gives participants the webinar-12-11 tag. On Monday you schedule everything at once:

The “Announcement” broadcast — To: newsletter, scheduled start on Tuesday at 11:00. Text: the topic, the date and the word to register — “Write WEBINAR to get the link”.
The “Reminder a day before” broadcast — To: webinar-12-11, start on Wednesday at 18:00: “Tomorrow at 7 p.m. — the webinar. The link will come an hour before”.
The “Link” broadcast — To: webinar-12-11, start on Thursday at 18:00: “We start in an hour, link: …”.

The second and third broadcasts select recipients at the moment of start. So everyone who registered on Tuesday and Wednesday after the announcement gets the reminder and the link, although the broadcasts were created back on Monday. If the webinar is postponed, stop the two scheduled broadcasts and create new ones with another date.

Before you press Create a broadcast

The date and time are in the future, corrected for the server clock.
To has the right tags without typos — the tag Promo and the tag promo are different for a broadcast.
The text does not promise what will change before the start: price, availability, deadline.
Variables are checked — if some contacts have no name, start without {{name}} or with a neutral greeting.
Links in the text open, and the reply keyword matches the flow trigger.
You sent a test broadcast to yourself: give yourself the test tag in Contacts and send to it right away, without a scheduled start.

Where it works and how much it costs

Broadcasts go to Telegram, MAX and VK — to each person in the messenger where they wrote to the bot. Website chat visitors do not get broadcasts: you can only write to them while the chat is open. Only those who wrote to your bot themselves receive it: the bot does not write to phone numbers.

The Broadcasts section is available on the Basic (650 ₽ a month per bot) and Business plans. On Free it shows that broadcasts are part of those plans. Flows that collect tags for future broadcasts work on any plan: you can build up the base in advance.

The message is text only: there are no images or buttons in a broadcast. To get a reply, ask people to write a word that starts the right flow.

Broadcasts in CHBT Broadcasts in a Telegram bot Broadcast by segments Trigger chains