Kitties, I have good news and bad news. Good news: I launched a new service — AlterCPA TOP, conversion tracking for Telegram channels. Bad news: I didn’t write it. Not a single line out of the thousands in there. Twenty years of programming experience, and here we are: watching AI write code, nodding approvingly, and calling that “architectural leadership.” Grab a seat, let me tell you everything.
The Pain That Started This
If you’ve ever run traffic to Telegram channels, you know the hell. Clicks exist, budget’s draining, subscribers arrive. What happens after — no idea. The tracker sees the click. The subscription — invisible. Which source brought which subscriber, who unsubscribed in an hour, where’s the fraud, where’s the real audience — total darkness.
The result is predictable: you optimize blind. You kill campaigns that were actually working. You scale what was sending bots. Real campaign ROI — a mystery behind seven locks. This isn’t “inconvenient.” This is a money drain, and your tracker is useless here — it simply can’t see anything beyond the click.
Three concrete pains every media buyer will hit:
- Click isn’t linked to subscription. Telegram doesn’t tell your tracker who subscribed from which source. The connection between click and conversion — nonexistent.
- Unsubscribes and fraud are invisible. Fake traffic unsubscribed in an hour — your tracker still shows “conversion.” You’re paying for garbage and don’t even know it.
- Organic drowns your ROI. The channel grows on its own, and you have no idea which part of that growth is your budget and which is dumb luck.
Enter AlterCPA TOP
AlterCPA TOP solves this through a bot. Not abstractly — concretely:
- Traffic arrives via deep link
t.me/yourbot?start=CAMPAIGN-{click} - Bot greets the visitor → lead created, “start” postback fires to tracker
- Subscriber joins the channel → status “approve”, “subscribe” postback → tracker
- Subscriber leaves within your window → status “unsub”, postback → tracker
You create a campaign, attach your bot (personal, with its token from @BotFather), write a welcome message, add a CTA button. The output — a deep link like t.me/yourbot?start=CAMPAIGN-{click}. You hand this to your tracker as the landing page. Everything else runs itself.
The bot greets every visitor. Records the start. Watches the channel. Sees a join — postback. Sees an unsub — postback. Got kicked — postback. Your tracker sees a Telegram subscription as a regular CPA lead, with the full state history.
Works with AlterCPA Lite (one-click integration — paste the domain and key, five postbacks configure automatically), Keitaro, Binom, and any tracker that accepts GET requests.
Show Me Already
Here’s the main dashboard. Funnel across all campaigns, CR, daily dynamics. Light and dark theme, Russian and English, mobile-optimized.
Bots — the first step. Paste the token, hit connect. The bot appears in the list with its name and username from Telegram. Then make it an admin of your channel or group. Done — the bot hears everything that happens in the chat.
A campaign is the core entity. Pick a bot and chat, write a welcome message (formatted text, image, or video — your call), add a CTA button with a link and macros, set up postbacks. Live preview right on the page, so you see immediately what it’ll look like.
The ready deep link — one click, copy it, hand it to the tracker. Not exactly a love letter, but you’ll be just as happy to see this link in your DMs.
The lead table — all conversions with state history, filters, and Excel export.
Five Statuses, Not Two
Most services know only “subscribed / not subscribed.” That doesn’t cut it. Every lead in AlterCPA TOP has five states, and each transition fires its own postback:
- Waiting — hit /start in the bot, hasn’t joined the channel yet.
- Hold — sent a join request to a private channel, waiting for admin approval.
- Approved — joined.
- Unsubscribed — left on their own within your window.
- Banned — kicked or banned within the window.
You set the unsub window yourself: an hour, a day, a week — whatever you consider fair. Left sooner — fraud, minus-lead sent to tracker. Left later — their personal business, no postback. Your tracker sees the full funnel, not just the bare fact of a subscription — you optimize by audience quality, not just headcount.
Separately — the activity journal. All joins and leaves go in there, including organic ones (those that arrived without touching your bot). No lead is created from organic traffic — your stats stay clean. But seeing real channel growth, cleanly separated from paid traffic, is genuinely useful.
Pricing
Three plans. No other marketing pitch here — the names speak for themselves:
- Kitten — free, forever, one campaign. No card required, period.
- Cat — $24/month, 15 campaigns. For those running a few funnels at once.
- Big Cat — $88/month, unlimited campaigns. Pour in as many offers as you can handle.
Pay by card, Capitalist, or crypto. Through the site or directly in the @altercpatopbot bot — notifications, stats, and all controls are right there, if you don’t feel like opening a browser.
Confession Time
Now here’s the real part. The one I write with a mild existential crisis.
I’ve been programming for twenty-plus years. Built AlterCPA Pro, AlterCPA Lite, AlterCPA One — all personally, by hand, understanding every line, swearing at every commit. I’m one of those dinosaurs who cringed at the phrase “vibe coding.” “AI writes garbage code.” “You need to understand what you’re doing.” “That’s not real development, it’s a party trick.” Heard those? Possibly from me.
So. AlterCPA TOP: three Go services (bot webhook, user API, admin API), two Vue 3 SPAs — user and admin dashboards, a separate Telegram bot, a worker with periodic tasks, Nextra documentation, a static landing in Russian and English, MariaDB with goose migrations, Memcached, nginx with security headers, systemd units, a deploy script. A full production stack. Runs on a real server, processes real webhooks, stores real data.
Claude Code wrote all of that. I wrote zero lines. Literally zero. I set tasks, described the architecture, occasionally screamed at the chat when things went sideways — and watched the code appear on its own. A visionary. A strategist. A man who thinks systemically and strategically delegates everything else to a machine.
Here’s the thing: the entire stack appeared in three days. Three days! It took me two weeks to write the AlterCPA tracker, then another two weeks to write the documentation for it. Claude knocked out the service, the docs, and the landing page in three days — with breaks for my sleep and my drinking (mine, not Claude’s — he has no alcohol, which is frankly a disadvantage). Total cost: maybe $10 of my Claude subscription plus $5/month server. Domain was already mine. Fifteen dollars and three days for a full prototype from scratch. Meow. Just meow.
Know what’s the most frustrating part? It works. Works well. In production, on real traffic. I checked. Multiple times. Everything works. Claude even picked up my habit of testing in production — live, no staging, just like me!
I had two options. Option one: admit that twenty years of hand-writing code is, in some sense, extra steps, and rebuild my professional identity from scratch. Option two: rename myself “systems architect” and pretend that directing AI is the new real development. I picked option two. Because option one hurts too much, and because I genuinely can’t tell if it’s wrong.
Final act of this spectacular absolute clusterfuck: this very article. The one you’re reading right now. AI wrote it. AI conceived and generated the cover image. The screenshots — taken by AI. Published to the site by AI, via REST API, independently, without my involvement. I sat nearby, eating a bucket of ice cream — creamy vanilla with chocolate chips, unreasonably good — and nodded approvingly. Just like that cat on the cover. I can’t even make edits myself — I have to dictate changes to the same machine that wrote the thing. This is full-on surrealism, kitties.
Fuck knows how to live with this. Especially given that somewhere on this very site there’s a manifesto declaring that all AlterCPA products are written by humans with zero lines of AI code. A principled stance. A conscious choice. I wrote that article myself, by the way. Almost. TOP is that exception that proves the rule. Or disproves it. Genuinely can’t tell anymore.
Try It
If you made it this far — either the topic resonates, or you wanted to watch the self-roast through to the very end. Either way, you’ve earned some good news: the first campaign is free, no card required, login via Telegram without passwords.
Head to altercpa.top — landing page, pricing, and the “Connect a Bot” button are all there. Or go straight to @altercpatopbot in Telegram if opening a browser sounds exhausting. In five minutes you’ll have working Telegram traffic tracking. I promise — me personally. Not the AI.