TgVectorDB

The free, unlimited cloud vector database backed by... Telegram.

Store embeddings directly as Telegram messages. Search them semantically. No API keys. No Docker. No vector index scaling limits. No monthly VC-subsidized cloud bills. Just your Telegram account.

Turbopuffer for broke CS students surviving on instant ramen.

How it works

Your vectors are stored as messages in a private Telegram channel you own. A tiny local index (~1MB) routes queries to the correct cluster locally, and then we fetch only the strictly relevant messages via MTProto. We don't download the whole database.

Why? Because I am building a personal chatbot and refuse to pay $70/mo for a managed enterprise vector database to store my notes PDF collections that i wont even need in next semester.

Cold Query:  ~0.5 - 2.0 seconds (asking Telegram for messages)
Warm Query:  < 5 milliseconds (it's cached locally now)
Cost:        $0/month forever (perfect for your non-existent startup budget)
Scalability: Unlimited (or until Parel durov notices you are storing your entire university library)

Installation

TgVectorDB comes with built-in capabilities to ingest PDFs, DOCX, and text embeddings via Telegram directly. One command handles it all:

pip install tgvectordb

Getting Started

1. Get Telegram Credentials

1. Go to https://my.telegram.org
2. Log in with your phone number.
3. Click on "API development tools".
4. Create an application and copy your api_id and api_hash.

2. Quick Start

from tgvectordb import TgVectorDB

db = TgVectorDB(
    api_id=12345,
    api_hash="your_api_hash_here",
    phone="+91xxxxxxxxxx",
    db_name="my-notes",
)

# Add single texts
db.add("Photosynthesis converts sunlight into chemical energy in plants, which I need to know for tomorrow's exam.")
db.add("Neural networks learn patterns from training data. I just copy code from stackoverflow.")

# Search semantically
results = db.search("How do I pass biology without studying?", top_k=3)
for result in results:
    print(f"[{result['score']:.2f}] {result['text'][:80]}...")

# Ingest an entire document
db.add_source("CS101_final_cheatsheet_vFINAL_v2.pdf")

# Print database stats
print(db.stats())

Building a RAG Chatbot (The Real Reason You Are Here to Automate Homework)

Building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is entirely free here. Perfect for hobbyists, tinkerers, and broke students trying to build a personal AI tutor at 3 AM the night before an assignment is due.

from tgvectordb import TgVectorDB

db = TgVectorDB(
    api_id=12345, 
    api_hash="your_api_hash", 
    phone="+91xxxxxxxxxx", 
    db_name="last-minute-homework-bot"
)

# Toss your chaotic life knowledge and class slides into the void (One-time setup)
db.add_source("professor_ramble_transcript.pdf")
db.add_source("assignment_that_makes_no_sense.md")

# Query context on the fly
def answer(question: str):
    context = db.search(question, top_k=5)
    context_text = "\n".join([r["text"] for r in context])
    
    # Pass to your local LLM (Ollama, vLLM, etc.)
    prompt = f"Context:\n{context_text}\n\nQuestion: {question}"
    return ask_llm(prompt)

Features

• Free Forever: Telegram provides unlimited cloud storage entirely at no cost. Thanks, Telegram.
• Zero Infrastructure: No Docker containers, servers, or external databases to manage.
• Highly Durable: Your data safely resides on Telegram's multi-datacenter infrastructure.
• Fully Portable: Run db.backup() on one machine and db.restore() on another. You're fully back up and running.
• Fast Search: 0.5-1.5s for cold queries, <5ms for warm queries with our extremely complex intelligent caching.
• Private & Secure: Your data stays within your private Telegram channels.

Architecture & Details

• Uses intfloat/e5-small-v2 for embeddings (384 dimensions, runs perfectly on CPU).
• Vectors are int8 quantized to fit strictly within Telegram's 4096-character message limits.
• Powered by Telethon (MTProto) for high-speed message fetching directly from the network, bypassing normal Bot API restrictions.
• Strong Recommendation: Use a secondary, dedicated Telegram account instead of your primary personal account. If you get rate limited, you don't want your main chats delayed.

API Reference

Database Operations

db.add("text")                          # Add single text passage
db.add_batch(texts, metadatas)          # Add multiple texts optimally
db.add_source("file.pdf")               # Parse and add a PDF file
db.add_source("notes.docx")             # Parse and add a Word document
db.add_source("data.csv")               # Add a CSV (auto-converts to semantic text)
db.add_source("code.py")                # Add a raw code file
db.add_directory("./my_docs/")          # Recursively add all supported files from a folder
db.add_directory("./docs", extensions=[".pdf", ".docx"])  # Filter directory ingestion

# Search & Retrieval
db.search("query", top_k=5)             # Perform semantic search
db.search("query", filter={"src": "x"}) # Search combined with metadata filtering

# Maintenance
db.reindex()                            # Force dataset re-clustering for IVF
db.backup()                             # Push local index mapping over to Telegram
db.restore()                            # Restore local index mapping from Telegram
db.delete(filter={"src": "old.pdf"})    # Delete specific vectors matching a rule
db.stats()                              # Display database telemetry

Supported Formats

All these formats are seamlessly extracted with a basic pip install tgvectordb, requiring no messy external boilerplate!

.pdf, .docx, .txt, .md, .html, .csv, .tsv, .json, .jsonl, .xml, .yaml, .py, .js, .java, .go, .rs, and most text-based source code files.

Disclaimer

This library is a hobbyist experimental project designed for side-projects, panic-built student chatbots, and folks who don't want to pay Qdrant or any other cloud vectordb provider when their bank account has $4 in it. It is practically a satire of modern VC-backed enterprise vector databases. It works genuinely well, but please do not run your mission-critical, HIPAA-compliant enterprise SaaS on top of my Telegram hack. Because if it breaks, the only customer support you're getting is me reading your GitHub issue and closing it.

Note: This project ingeniously (or stupidly) leverages Telegram's cloud infrastructure as a backend storage. While projects like Pentaract have achieved this since 2023 with excellent success, this is not an officially promoted enterprise use-case by Telegram. Please use a secondary account and respectfully avoid abusing rate limits so we don't ruin this for all the other broke students.

License

MIT License — Do whatever you want with it!