WhatsApp Business API pricing in India (2026)

How WhatsApp API pricing works

Since 1 July 2025, Meta bills the WhatsApp Business Platform per message instead of per 24-hour conversation. Template messages are charged when they are delivered, and since 1 October 2026 so are service replies beyond a free monthly allowance. The price depends on two things:

• The template category—marketing, utility or authentication. Meta checks the category when it reviews a template and can re-categorise it.
• The recipient’s country, worked out from their phone number’s country code—not from where your business is.

India rates

What is free

• 1,000 service messages a month per business phone number: free-form replies within 24 hours of the customer’s last message. The allowance resets monthly and doesn’t roll over.
• Free entry points: when a customer starts a chat from a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or your Facebook Page’s call-to-action, Meta opens a 72-hour window in which your messages are free.
• Failed messages: undelivered messages aren’t charged.

Worked examples

A Diwali campaign to 20,000 customers

20,000 marketing messages × ₹0.8631 = ₹17,262 in Meta fees, before GST. In practice fewer messages are charged: opted-out contacts are skipped, Meta’s per-user marketing limit holds back some deliveries, and undelivered messages are free.

An online store’s order updates

3,000 orders a month, each with a confirmation and a shipping update = 6,000 utility messages × ₹0.115 = ₹690. Since 1 October 2026 these are charged even when the customer is already chatting with you.

OTPs for an app

50,000 logins a month × ₹0.115 = ₹5,750. Compare this with SMS, which in India also needs DLT registration and has no read receipts.

Provider fees and GST

Your total bill has three parts:

1. Meta’s message fees, as above.
2. Your provider’s fee—a monthly subscription, a markup per message, or both.
3. GST on the taxable amounts.

Per-message markups are easy to miss: an extra ₹0.20 on every marketing message adds ₹4,000 to the 20,000-message campaign above. With Engage, every fee is published: plans from ₹1,999 a month, plus a prepaid wallet that pays ₹0.10 per delivered marketing message and ₹0.02 for utility, OTP and paid replies, while Meta bills its own fee at Meta’s rates. There’s a 14-day free trial.

How to spend less

• Choose the right category. Transactional updates belong in utility templates, which cost a fraction of marketing. Don’t add promotional lines to them—Meta will re-categorise the template as marketing.
• Reply inside the window. Invite customers to message you first (QR codes, website chat buttons, ads) so more of your follow-ups are replies covered by the 1,000 free service messages, or free entry points from ads.
• Segment campaigns. Sending to engaged customers costs less and protects your quality rating.
• Estimate before you send. Engage shows the audience size, excluded contacts and Meta cost on the review step of every campaign.