WhatsApp Business messages get costlier in India from today
What's the story
Meta has revised its pricing structure for the WhatsApp Business Platform, effective from October 1. The change impacts businesses using the platform through solution providers or direct integration. Under the new system, each business phone number will get 1,000 service messages per month free of charge. After that, Meta will charge ₹0.115 per delivered service message in India.
Pricing changes
Utility messages also chargeable under new pricing
The new pricing structure also includes charges for certain "utility" messages like order confirmations and delivery updates.
These will be chargeable even within a 24-hour customer support window that starts when a customer messages the business.
Authentication messages will now cost ₹0.115 per delivered message in India. The marketing message rate is ₹0.8631 per delivered message, according to Meta's published prices,
Until September 30, these service messages were free of charge under Meta's previous policy.
Future plans
AI-powered service for customer conversations coming soon
Meta is also planning to introduce an AI-powered service in 2026 for businesses to handle customer conversations and recommendations.
The responses from business agents will be charged at $2 per million tokens, which measures the amount of text processed by the AI.
This separate charge for AI tokens will be applicable even if a customer initiates a WhatsApp chat from an ad.