I turned Telegram into a desktop cloud drive — free, unlimited, open source

Over the past few weeks I built CraftCloud — a desktop app that turns Telegram into a fully-featured cloud drive. Think Google Drive, but free and unlimited, running on Telegram's infrastructure.

What it does

Full cloud-drive UI — folder tree, list/icon views, drag-and-drop
Upload files up to 4GB each, no total storage limit
Online preview for images, audio (with seek bar), video, text
Auto-sync local folders to Telegram directories on a schedule
Fuzzy search with Whoosh full-text indexing + jieba Chinese word segmentation
6 languages, system tray, dark/light themes
Task queue with persistent history (SQLite + SQLAlchemy ORM)

Tech stack

Layer	Tech
GUI	PySide6 ≥6.5 + PySide6-Fluent-Widgets
Telegram API	Telethon ≥1.36
Database	SQLAlchemy 2.x ORM + SQLite (WAL mode)
Config	Pydantic ≥2.0 + PyYAML
Logging	loguru
Search	Whoosh + jieba
Caching	diskcache

What my project does

Over the past few weeks I built CraftCloud — a desktop app that turns Telegram into a fully-featured cloud drive. Think Google Drive, but free and (virtually) unlimited, running on Telegram's infrastructure. It gives you a native desktop interface to upload, download, search, and manage files directly through your Telegram account, with automatic sync and full local caching.

Target audience

This project is aimed at two main groups:

Telegram power users who want unlimited, zero-cost cloud storage without monthly subscriptions (perfect for backing up photos, videos, and documents).
Python developers / hobbyists looking for a real-world reference on building a complex async GUI desktop app with Telethon, PySide6, and advanced thread/event-loop concurrency control.

It's currently a side-project / production-ready-for-personal-use tool (I use it daily), but it's stable enough for anyone comfortable with self-hosting their own cloud solution on Telegram.

Comparative analysis (vs. existing alternatives)

Alternative	How CraftCloud differs
Google Drive / Dropbox / iCloud	❌ No recurring subscription fees. Telegram offers 2GB per file and effectively unlimited total storage (based on your account). Data is transmitted via Telegram's MTProto encryption.
Rclone (Telegram backend)	✅ CraftCloud provides a native, polished desktop GUI (Windows 11 fluent design) instead of a CLI. Drag-and-drop, visual file management, and built-in search make it accessible to non-developers.
Telegram Desktop native storage	✅ Dedicated file manager view with advanced features like full-text search (Whoosh + jieba), WAL-mode SQLite for reliability, and automatic background sync.

Key trade-offs to consider:

⚠️ Speed is limited by Telegram's datacenter rate limits (not ideal for massive 100GB+ daily transfers).
⚠️ It relies on Telegram's server-side encryption (MTProto), not client-side zero-knowledge E2EE—so treat it as a convenient backup tool rather than a secure vault for highly sensitive data.