How much does WhatsApp cost for businesses? The pricing model explained!

If you’re trying to untangle WhatsApp’s complex business pricing, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll explain how WhatsApp calculates its messaging prices and what different pricing models exist.

Fact: With its engaging and easy-to-use chat features, WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. Also fact: If you’re a business and want to use WhatsApp at scale for your customer communication, you’ve probably found the platform not quite as intuitive, especially when it comes to pricing.

As WhatsApp has three distinct offers for businesses that each comes with its own pricing, it can be quite tricky to understand the differences and how WhatsApp calculates the costs. So, let’s unpack WhatsApp’s business pricing.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the WhatsApp Business costs, let’s take a closer look at the three ways businesses can use WhatsApp to communicate with customers: the free WhatsApp Business app, the WhatsApp Business Premium subscription, and the WhatsApp Business Platform (API). Keep in mind that businesses aren’t allowed to use their private WhatsApp accounts for commercial purposes. You need a dedicated WhatsApp Business account.

• WhatsApp Business: This is an app for small businesses that you can download for iOS and Android. This app is free to download and use, and there are no costs for messaging customers. However, there are also several limitations. For example, you can only send push messages to a maximum of 256 contacts per broadcast list, there are no automation features, and it’s not fully compliant with data privacy regulations in many markets like the U.S., the European Union, and the UK.

• WhatsApp Business Premium: This is an optional subscription model for users of the WhatsApp Business app. The upgrade (only available in some regions) offers additional features like scheduling messages and more linked devices, but you’ll still see similar limitation as with the regular WhatsApp Business app. Note that WhatsApp Business Premium be discontinued on February 25, 2025. You’ll be able to access some features with a new Meta Verified subscription. WhatsApp has never officially revealed the pricing for this subscription offer.

• WhatsApp Business Platform (API): The WhatsApp Business Platform (API) gives you access to the entire WhatsApp Business suite. This includes a potentially unlimited amount of push messages, chatbots, scheduled messaging, analytics, and much more. WhatsApp doesn’t charge businesses for using the API. Instead, there is conversation-based pricing model.

As this pricing system can get pretty complex, we’ll take a closer look at how messaging prices are calculated on the WhatsApp Business Platform.

If you’re new to WhatsApp Business and want to learn more, download our step-by-step WhatsApp guide for a full picture of how you can leverage WhatsApp in a large-scale business.

As mentioned, the WhatsApp Business Platform uses conversation-based prices. This means that businesses are being charged depending on the type of message (conversation) they send within a 24-hour window. There are four types of conversation categories: marketing, utility, authentication, service.

• Marketing: Business-initiated conversations to market a product or service to customers, such as relevant offers to customers who’ve opted in. Any business-initiated conversation that does not qualify as an authentication or utility conversation would also fall under this category.

• Utility: Business-initiated conversations relating to a transaction, including post-purchase notifications and recurring billing statements to customers who’ve opted in.

• Authentication: Business-initiated conversations that enable businesses to authenticate users with one-time passcodes at multiple steps during the login process, such as account registration, account recovery, and integrity challenges.

• Service: Any user-initiated conversation, such as a customer inquiry. Since 2024, there are no more WhatsApp charges for user-initiated service conversations.

Marketing, utility, and authentication messages can only be sent to users through a templated message. WhatsApp also has to approve the template before its first usage, which typically only takes a few minutes. Once businesses send an approved template, a new 24-hour conversation window opens.

The price of each message in this timeframe is then determined by the type of conversation and the region. To give you an idea of the WhatsApp Business API pricing, we’ve put together the current 2025 rates for conversation-based messages in different regions.

In North America,

• a marketing message costs $0.025 USD
• a utility message costs $0.004 USD
• an authentication message costs $0.0135 USD

In the U.K.,

• a marketing message costs $0.0529 USD
• a utility message costs $0.022 USD
• an authentication message costs $0.0358 USD

In India,

• a marketing message costs $0.0107 USD
• a utility message costs $0.0014 USD
• an authentication message costs $0.0014 USD ($0.028 USD internationally)

You can see a full cost overview by country in Meta’s rate cards.

For February 1, 2025, Meta has announced a pricing update to its authentication rates for some countries, including Egypt, Malaysia, South Africa, and the UAE. Overall, according to Meta, there will be several pricing updates throughout the year as WhatsApp wants to adjust its business pricing more regularly.

And in July, WhatsApp will start to enforce message-based pricing, where companies will pay per delivered message.

As mentioned, WhatsApp looks at conversations between businesses and customers within a rolling 24-hour period.

For marketing, utility, and authentication conversations, the conversation window starts when a templated message is sent and delivered to the end user. Upon delivery, a 24-hour session is started, during which you can send one or more messages (matching the initial conversation type) without incurring additional fees.

It’s important to note that WhatsApp started limiting the number of marketing messages that businesses can send in order to protect users from spam. Since 2024, businesses can’t send more than two marketing messages to a customer in a 24-hour period.

At the same time, WhatsApp has made it easier for businesses to help customers. Since November 2024, WhatsApp doesn’t charge businesses for service conversations anymore. However, you can only send a non-templated customer service message if there’s already an open service conversation message window.

In addition, businesses also can’t use a template from one category (e.g., utility) to send messages matching a different category (e.g., marketing). If you send a message type that doesn’t match the open conversation type, a new conversation will start and separate fees will be charged.

Here are four examples of how WhatsApp’s Business Platform pricing could look in practice.

Situation: A service conversation is opened at 9:31 AM when a business response to a customer message is delivered. While this conversation is open, the business also delivers a marketing template at 4:30 PM. This now triggers a new marketing conversation.

Cost: This results in two separate charges: one for a service conversation and one for a marketing conversation. Changing the message category within the same chat triggers a separate conversation charge.

Exception: Free entry point conversations are an exception to this rule. A template sent during the three-day free window doesn’t open a new conversation. More on free entry points later.

Situation: A business opens a marketing conversation at 3:40 PM when their marketing template message is delivered. A few hours later, with the marketing conversation still open, the business delivers a utility template. This now opens a separate utility conversation.

Cost: The business is charged for one marketing conversation and one utility conversation.

Situation: A business delivers a utility message at 9 AM. Two hours later, at 11 AM, the company delivers a second utility template message.

Cost: The business is only charged for one utility conversation because it used the same message template type. Two conversations of the same message category count as one.

Situation: A business sends one template that includes both marketing and utility content at 11:59 AM. Whenever WhatsApp identifies marketing content in a message template, it categorizes the message as a marketing conversation.

Cost: The business receives one marketing conversation charge.

The WhatsApp Business Platform also offers free entry points for conversations. Simply put, after a user has messaged you first by clicking on a click-to-WhatsApp ad (the free entry point), you can send any type of WhatsApp message to a customer without incurring additional charges.

Free entry point conversations need to meet two conditions:

1. A user enters your WhatsApp Business chat either through a click-to-WhatsApp ad or a call-to-action button on your Facebook Page.
2. You answer their message within 24 hours.

In a free entry point conversation, your time window for a conversation also expands from 24 to 72 hours. This gives you an extra 48 hours to send free templated messages.

These free entry point conversations can be particularly interesting for multi-day campaigns like Valentine’s Day or Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.

There’s a limit to how many WhatsApp messages your business can send in a 24-hour period. Initially, you’re limited to 250 business-initiated conversations in a rolling 24-hour window. However, this can be increased to:

• 1,000 conversations
• 10,000 conversations
• 100,000 conversations
• an unlimited number of conversations

You can increase your limit to 1,000 by verifying your business and identity — provided that you have a high quality score (high engagement, low complaint and block rates, etc.).

Any increase beyond the 1,000 tier is subject to automated scaling by WhatsApp. Here, WhatsApp looks at your quality score (it has to be medium or high) and the open rate of your business-initiated conversations. If you reach a certain threshold of opened conversations (50% of your current messaging limit), WhatsApp increases your limit by one level 24 hours later.

However, WhatsApp can also lower your limits immediately by one level if your quality rating has been flagged. This is a way to ensure that businesses only send messages to users that have given prior consent and that deliver engaging content.

Here are some tips for sending high-quality messages:

• Ensure your messages comply with the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy.
• Send messages exclusively to users who have provided consent to receive them.
• Craft messages to be highly personalized and valuable to recipients.
• Refrain from sending generic or open-ended welcome messages.
• Manage messaging frequency carefully; avoid overwhelming users with excessive daily messages.
• Optimize informational messages for relevance and brevity.

WhatsApp has already announced a number of changes in its message pricing for this year.

• Effective February 1, 2025: WhatsApp will expand international authentication rates to seven additional markets across APAC and EMEA.
• Effective April 1, 2025: Utility templates will be free of charge within the 24-hour customer service window.
• From April 1, 2025: Businesses won’t be able to send marketing messages to users with a U.S. number anymore. While U.S. businesses can still use WhatsApp to send templated marketing messages to users in all other markets, WhatsApp is pausing the ability to send WhatsApp marketing messages in the United States. It’ll still be possible to reach U.S. consumers via utility, authentication and service conversations as well as through click-to-WhatsApp ads. WhatsApp said that due to the messaging app’s early stages in the U.S., people are less likely to read marketing messages on WhatsApp. Instead, WhatsApp encourages businesses to focus on building customer relationships through other types of conversations. There will be a continuous evaluation to see when the market will be ready to receive marketing messages.
• Starting April 1, 2025: WhatsApp will start rolling out a new per-message pricing model. With this, businesses will be charged per message for template messages instead of per conversation.

With these changes, WhatsApp wants to make its pricing “simpler and more consistent with industry practices, encourage higher-quality messaging experiences for people, and better align with value delivered for people and businesses.”

Keep in mind that if you want to take full advantage of WhatsApp’s capabilities — from providing customer support to sending one-time passwords and marketing messages — you need to use the WhatsApp Business Platform. Only official WhatsApp Business Providers (like Sinch!) can give you access to the official WhatsApp Business API and help you unlock all the advantages of the messaging app for your business.

Got questions about WhatsApp Business costs or need help getting started with WhatsApp Business? Get in touch with our experts!

Why should I pay for WhatsApp messages on the API if I can use the WhatsApp Business app and message customers for free?

The WhatsApp Business app was designed for very small businesses and freelancers that only cater to a limited number of customers and therefore also only offers basic features. Once your business grows, you’ll need larger messaging capacities as well, which is where the WhatsApp Business API comes in.

Using the API, you can use automation features, add bots, and push out a much larger number of promotional messages while benefitting from WhatsApp’s rich messaging features (videos, voice messages, carousels, and more). This allows you to design more engaging customer experiences and can bring you a higher return on your investment.

Is there a subscription for WhatsApp Business messages?

There are several digital communication providers (verified WhatsApp Business Solution Providers) like Sinch that offer convenient and secure out-of-the-box WhatsApp messaging solutions that you can use with a monthly subscription. These require no special IT skills and the setup only takes minutes, which is ideal for companies that don’t want to invest a lot of time and resources in building their own WhatsApp solution.

Why are marketing messages more expensive than other conversation categories?

According to WhatsApp, different conversation categories deliver different returns for a business. Because marketing messages have a better chance to lead to a purchase or conversion, WhatsApp considers that they deliver the highest returns for businesses — and therefore charges more for them.

Are there any free messages on the WhatsApp Business API?

Yes! The user-initiated service conversations are free of charge and once a business opens a new 24-hour window for a conversation category, it can send more than one message of the same category in that time period.

What if a business responds to a user message within the 24-hour conversation session, but the business’ message is not delivered until after the conversation session closes? Will the business be charged for another conversation?

No. There will be no additional conversation charge if a message is sent to a user in an open 24-hour conversation session, but only delivered after the 24-hour conversation session closes.

What if my business is the victim of malicious attacks, unwanted messages or spam? Will I have to pay for receiving these unwanted messages?

No. User-initiated conversations are now free, and in general, a conversation session does not initiate until the first business reply to a user message is delivered.