Back in 2016, I wanted a simple thing: let website visitors ask questions through a chat widget, and have the answers come straight to my Telegram. No fancy dashboards, no third-party apps — just Telegram. So I built it and open-sourced it.
The setup takes about 5 minutes. You create a Telegram bot, run the installer on your server, paste the widget code into your site — done. Visitors see a chat bubble, type their question, and the message lands in your Telegram. You reply from Telegram, and your answer appears in the widget. That's it.
The project includes a self-hosted setup tool with configuration, widget generator, and even a donate page (with a quokka photo — because why not). It supports SQLite and MySQL, works with self-signed SSL certificates, and handles webhooks automatically.
The project hit 500+ stars on GitHub and got installed on over 15,000 websites. I wrote an article about it on Habr (Russian tech blog), which brought a lot of attention. It was one of those rare cases where a weekend project actually took off.
Built with PHP and vanilla JavaScript. The widget is lightweight — just a JS snippet and a CSS file. No dependencies, no frameworks on the frontend side. The whole philosophy was: keep it dead simple.