WhatsApp’s free lunch ends on 1 October
Meta has committed to publishing per-market rates by 1 September, a month before it starts billing. Until that happens, the service column on its rate card reads “n/a”, and every figure in circulation – including the 12c/message doing the rounds locally – is an industry estimate reverse-engineered from what utility and authentication templates cost today.
Meta has illustrated the shift: a single hour-long exchange that opens with a marketing message, moves through automated replies and a handover to a human agent, and closes with an order confirmation. Today that produces one billable message. From 1 October, by Meta’s own count, the same exchange will produce five charges.
A retail order query can easily run to half a dozen replies. A fintech or insurance interaction, a know-your-customer check, a claim, an account dispute, can run longer and have more steps. Telecommunications queries are short but arrive in enormous numbers. In each case, the cost is a function of how many times the business has to reply, and a support conversation is nothing but replies.
He said “it’s clear” businesses “need to start adjusting their message flows now in order to lessen that impact”.
But solution providers tracking Meta’s documentation have warned that utility templates sent in reply to a customer inside the same 24-hour window, free since July 2025, also become billable on 1 October. So, the obvious dodge, to reclassify the reply as a utility template, no longer escapes the charge if it happens inside the service window.
Template routing still helps where a message genuinely belongs in a template and can be sent outside the window, but the blanket version of the tip does not survive the change.
Even that carries an asterisk, though: businesses using Meta’s own Business Agent are charged for the tokens it burns inside that window, a charge that began on 1 August at $2 per million tokens, or roughly four to five US cents a reply. That token meter is a third way to be billed for a reply, alongside the per-message service charge and the utility template, and it scales with how complicated the answer is rather than how many messages it takes.
Despite repeated requests by TechCentral for comment since last Friday, Meta had not responded to questions by the time of publication. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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