Pricing on the WhatsApp Business Platform (Meta docs)
meta's first-party pricing reference for the whatsapp-business-platform. The canonical statement of how the channel bills, and the source that closes this wiki's standing pricing gap.
The model changed on 1 July 2025
Meta replaced conversation-based pricing with per-message-pricing. The old model billed 24-hour conversation windows; the new one bills each delivered template message. Meta's stated reason is alignment with industry norms, on the argument that businesses find message volumes easier to plan than conversation volumes. The conversation-based page still exists, marked deprecated.
What is billable
Charges apply only when a message with type set to template is delivered — not on send, and
not on failure. The three message-template categories bill differently:
| Category | Billing |
|---|---|
| Marketing | Always billable at standard rates |
| Utility | Billable outside an open customer-service-window; free inside it |
| Authentication | Billable outside the window; volume-tier discounted |
Rates vary by the recipient's country calling code, so cost is a function of where the customer is, not where the business is.
What is free
Non-template messages (text, image, and other free-form types) sent inside an open customer-service-window cost nothing. So do all messages, template or not, inside a 72-hour free entry point window, which opens when a business replies within 24 hours to a user who made contact through a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or a Facebook Page call-to-action. Meta pays for the traffic its own ad products generate.
Volume tiers
Utility and authentication messages unlock lower rates as monthly volume rises, aggregated across every WABA in a portfolio. Tiers are market-and-category specific and reset monthly at midnight in the account's timezone. Only charged messages count toward a tier: free utility templates and in-window messages don't accrue, so the discount tracks spend rather than activity.
Dated specifics
Volume-tier update webhooks arrived 1 October 2025. On 1 July 2026 Meta adjusted rates in several markets and localized billing to Brazilian Real. Per this wiki's standing caveat, treat every rate and tier as a snapshot.
Re-read 2026-08-30. Everything above holds, and the change log has grown at both ends:
- 1 November 2024 — service conversations became free for all businesses. That predates this page and belongs on it, because it is the first of the moves this repricing continued: Meta has been steadily making the reactive half of the channel free and charging for the outbound half.
- 1 January 2026 — billing localized to Indian Rupee, the same move Brazil got six months later.
- 1 October 2026, announced — further market migrations with rate adjustments across Bangladesh, Iraq, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman and Ukraine. Nine markets in one wave.
- 2026 — a max-price control is coming to the Marketing Messages API, letting a sender cap what it will pay per message.
Two of these are worth more than their dates. The localization sequence (India, then Brazil, then nine more markets) says the pricing surface is being rebuilt currency by currency rather than adjusted globally, so "the rate" is increasingly a per-market object and any single figure quoted here ages by market rather than all at once. And max-price is the first control described that lets the buyer bound the cost rather than only read it, which is a different relationship to a rate card than this page has been describing.
Tier
T1. First-party platform documentation from the operator that sets the prices — the highest authority available for this claim. The caveat is freshness rather than reliability: Meta has repriced this channel repeatedly, and the page documents its own most recent change.
Related
per-message-pricing · customer-service-window · message-template · whatsapp-business-platform · meta · synthesis