Two separate bills, not one: Meta's per-message charges, and the software fee your CRM or provider adds on top.
Start free trial →WhatsApp Business API pricing in India has two separate layers. Meta charges you per delivered template message — the rate depends on the template's category and the recipient's country. Your CRM or Business Solution Provider charges a separate software fee on top. Since July 2025 Meta bills per message, not per 24-hour conversation.
Most confusion about WhatsApp API costs comes from mixing those two layers together. A provider quoting you "₹999 a month" and a provider quoting you "₹0.86 a message" are not competitors quoting the same thing — they are quoting different layers of the same stack. This page separates them.
| Layer | Who charges it | What it is priced on |
|---|---|---|
| Message charges | Meta | Per delivered template message, by category and recipient country |
| Software / platform fee | Your CRM or Business Solution Provider (BSP) | Usually a monthly subscription, sometimes a per-message markup |
| Phone number | Your telecom provider | A number you own and can receive an OTP on, one time |
| GST | Applied on the Indian invoice | 18% on both layers above, as Indian providers normally bill it |
Meta does not charge a licence or access fee for the WhatsApp Cloud API. What Meta charges for is outbound business-initiated messaging. The software layer exists because the raw API is a developer interface — it has no inbox, no team assignment, no contact records and no reporting. Somebody has to build that, and that is what the monthly fee pays for.
Some providers resell Meta's message charges with a markup instead of passing them through at cost. That is worth asking about directly, because a small markup on a large volume matters more than the subscription price.
Meta replaced conversation-based pricing with per-message pricing effective 1 July 2025. Under the old model you paid for a 24-hour "conversation" window, and any number of messages inside that window was covered by one charge. That unit is gone. Meta's own documentation now labels conversation-based pricing as deprecated.
Under per-message pricing you are charged for each template message that is actually delivered. Three things determine the price:
A separate change landed earlier, on 1 November 2024: service conversations became free for all businesses. Combined with per-message pricing, the practical effect is that replying to customers costs nothing and reaching out to them costs money.
| What you are sending | Charged? | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing template (offer, promo, re-engagement) | Charged, always | No volume tiering; charged on every delivery even if a service window is open |
| Utility template (order update, payment reminder, appointment) | Charged outside the window | Free when delivered inside an open customer service window |
| Authentication template (OTP, login code) | Charged outside the window | Volume tiering applies; a separate authentication-international rate exists for some routes |
| A free-text reply to a customer who messaged you | Free | Non-template messages are free, and can only be sent inside an open service window |
| Anything inside a free entry point window | Free | Opened by Click-to-WhatsApp ads and Page call buttons |
| A template that fails to deliver | Free | You are only charged on delivery |
When a customer messages your business, a 24-hour customer service window opens. Inside it you can send free-form messages with no template approval and no charge, and utility templates are free too. Once 24 hours pass with no new inbound message, the window closes and you can only reach that person again with an approved template — which is billable.
If a customer reaches you through a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or a call button on your Facebook Page, Meta opens a longer 72-hour window in which all message types to that user are free. This is why Click-to-WhatsApp ads are often the cheapest way to start conversations at volume — the ad spend is real, but the messaging inside the window is not billed.
Meta publishes a rate card by country and category and revises it periodically. Meta also opened INR billing for customers whose sold-to country is India from 1 January 2026, with a migration deadline of 31 December 2026 — accounts that have not migrated by then face message delivery being halted from 1 January 2027. Meta's documentation notes rate increases applied on 1 January 2026 for marketing and 1 April 2026 for authentication-international.
Meta's public pricing documentation describes the model but points to a separate rate card for the actual figures, which is not published as a clean public table. The numbers below are the rates Indian providers were publishing in 2026, and they agree with each other closely — but treat them as indicative, not as quotes from Meta:
| Template category | Reported India rate per delivered message | Volume tiering |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | approx. ₹0.86 | No |
| Utility | approx. ₹0.12 | Yes |
| Authentication | approx. ₹0.12 | Yes |
| Service reply / non-template in window | ₹0 | Not applicable |
The gap between marketing and utility is the single most important number on this page. Marketing costs roughly seven times what utility costs per message, so how your templates get categorised has more effect on your bill than which provider you pick. Meta assigns the category at template review, and a promotional message written as an "order update" will normally be recategorised as marketing.
Take a business that gets 800 inbound customer enquiries a month, sends 400 order and payment updates as utility templates, and runs one marketing campaign to 2,000 contacts.
Meta's share of that bill is about ₹1,744 before tax, and roughly 99% of it is the marketing campaign. For a business that mostly answers customers rather than broadcasting to them, Meta's charges can be close to zero and the software fee is effectively the whole cost. For a business that broadcasts heavily, the reverse is true and the per-message rate is what you should be negotiating.
Access to the WhatsApp Cloud API itself has no licence fee from Meta, but sending business-initiated template messages is charged per delivered message. Most businesses also pay a software fee to whichever CRM or Business Solution Provider they use to actually send and manage the messages.
No. Meta deprecated conversation-based pricing and moved to per-message pricing effective 1 July 2025. You are now billed per delivered template message rather than per 24-hour conversation window.
Per Meta's pricing documentation: service replies and other non-template messages sent inside an open 24-hour customer service window are free, utility templates sent inside that window are free, and all messages inside a free entry point window are free. Marketing templates are always charged.
Rate cards published by Indian providers in 2026 put marketing templates at roughly ₹0.86 per delivered message and utility or authentication templates at roughly ₹0.12, before 18% GST. Meta sets and periodically revises these rates, so check Meta's official rate card before budgeting.
Meta applies volume tiering to utility and authentication templates, aggregated across your business portfolio and reset monthly. Marketing templates do not get volume tiering. Only charged messages count toward the tiers.
Indian providers generally apply 18% GST to both the Meta message charges they pass through and their own platform fee. Treat published per-message rates as pre-tax numbers when you build a budget.
Meta's API delivers messages. It does not tell you who the person is, what they bought last time, or which of your team already replied. If you go the API route you will need something on top of it that keeps a contact record, matches an incoming number to that record, logs the conversation, and lets more than one person work the inbox without stepping on each other.
You can build that, or use a CRM that already has the WhatsApp inbox in it. Pingo360 is the second option: a two-way WhatsApp Business inbox alongside a website chat inbox, automatic email logging, a sales pipeline, automation and reports, plus GST-compliant invoicing with the CGST/SGST/IGST split and UPI payment links. It is ₹999/month flat with unlimited team members — no per-seat pricing — billed monthly via Razorpay, with a 14-day free trial that needs no card.
Meta's per-message charges are separate from that and are billed by Meta regardless of which software you use. Pingo360 is a CRM with a WhatsApp inbox; it does not claim to replace Meta's billing relationship or to change the rates above. Questions: [email protected].