The era of free WhatsApp messaging for large businesses and organizations is coming to an end. Most businesses and organizations worldwide that operate customer service centers now use WhatsApp’s business API, which in many cases reduces the need for human service representatives.
Until now, Meta charged businesses when a customer service interaction was opened but allowed follow-up messages to continue free for the next 24 hours. Starting Thursday, Oct. 1, it will begin charging for every message sent, “from the very first one.”
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The rate set for a single “service message” is about $0.0056 per message, or roughly 2 agorot. However, because Meta gives businesses 1,000 free service messages each month, charges will apply only from the 1,001st message onward. That means most small businesses, which receive relatively few inquiries, are not expected to be affected. The companies likely to pay more are mainly large businesses and those that use customer service bots that tend to communicate through long sequences of short messages. Meta will continue not to charge for incoming messages sent by customers.
For years, whenever a customer initiated a new conversation with a business on WhatsApp, Meta allowed the business to continue messaging that customer — usually through a bot — free for 24 hours. In many cases, that “time window” was enough to resolve the inquiry. Under the new policy, Meta will charge for every outgoing message sent by the business, whether by a chatbot or a human representative. Companies are therefore being advised to configure bots and service representatives to favor consolidated messages rather than rapid exchanges made up of very short messages.
The change does not apply to the regular WhatsApp app, which is used by billions of people worldwide and will remain completely free. It also does not apply to the WhatsApp Business mobile app, which is aimed mainly at small businesses. The new policy applies only to businesses using the enterprise version of the service, WhatsApp Business API.