Meta charges for the WhatsApp Business API per delivered message, at a rate set by the message's category and the country of the number you send to. For UK numbers on Meta's GBP rate card, effective 1 October 2026, a marketing message costs £0.0458 and a utility, authentication or service message costs £0.0159, with the first 1,000 service messages each month free on every business phone number.
Those are Meta's prices. What you actually pay also depends on the provider you connect through, and on how you design the messages. Both matter more than people expect.
As of 5 November 2026. Prices checked against Meta's WhatsApp pricing documentation and the GBP rate card and volume tiers linked from it, effective 1 October 2026. Meta can change rates only on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, so check the current card before you budget.
The pricing model in force now
Meta moved from per-conversation to per-message pricing on 1 July 2025. You are charged when a message is delivered, not when it is sent, and Meta does not charge for messages customers send you.
Every message falls into one of these categories:
| Category | What it is for | UK rate (GBP) |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Offers, promotions, win-back, anything persuasive | £0.0458 |
| Utility | Non-promotional updates specific to the customer or essential to them: orders, bills, account alerts, outages | £0.0159 |
| Authentication | One-time passcodes | £0.0159 |
| Service | Free-form replies inside the 24-hour window | £0.0159 |
Marketing, utility and authentication messages are templates. You write them in advance, Meta approves them, and you can send them at any time. Service messages are the free-form replies you send after a customer has messaged you.
There is also a fifth category, Meta Business Agent, which is Meta's own AI answering on your behalf, priced by tokens rather than by message. If your agent is built separately and connected to WhatsApp, its replies are service messages.
Meta prices in several currencies, including GBP and USD. You choose the billing currency when the account is created and Meta says it cannot then be changed, though it now offers a migration route to a different currency. A business billed in pounds pays the GBP card. Every figure here is from that card, with no conversion.
What is free, and what changed on 1 October 2026
Two things changed this autumn, and older guides have not caught up.
Service messages are now charged after a free allowance. From 1 November 2024 until 30 September 2026, replies inside the customer service window were free. Since 1 October 2026, each business phone number gets 1,000 free delivered service messages a month. Unused messages do not roll over. From the 1,001st, each one is charged at £0.0159.
Utility templates inside an open window are no longer free. Between July 2025 and October 2026, a utility template sent while the customer service window was open cost nothing. It is now charged at the utility rate, unless it goes inside a free entry point window, below.
The 24-hour window still matters, just not as a price. It opens when the customer messages or calls you and resets each time they message again. Inside it you can reply in your own words. Outside it you need an approved template.
One genuinely free route remains. When a customer messages you from a Click-to-WhatsApp ad in the Android or iOS app, your reply opens a free entry point window. Meta's documentation says it may stay open for up to seven days, and no marketing, utility, authentication or service message is charged inside it.
What a solution provider adds
Most businesses connect to the API through a Business Solution Provider, a company Meta approves to resell access and supply the tools around it: the inbox, template management, the integration with your systems.
Their fees sit on top of Meta's. Some charge a monthly platform fee per number or per seat. Some add a margin to each message. Some do both. None of that appears on Meta's rate card.
When you compare providers, ask for three numbers separately: the monthly fee, the per-message charge they pass through, and whether that charge is Meta's rate or Meta's rate plus a margin. A low monthly fee with a markup on every message can cost more than a higher fee at cost, once your volume grows.
Worked examples
All of these use the UK GBP list rates above, before any provider fees.
An inbound support chat
A customer messages about a billing question. Your agent sends six replies over the conversation.
If the number is still inside its 1,000 free service messages for the month, the chat costs nothing.
After that: 6 × £0.0159 = £0.095, just under 10p.
At volume, say 3,000 chats a month at six replies each:
- 3,000 × 6 = 18,000 service messages
- 18,000 − 1,000 free = 17,000 charged
- 17,000 × £0.0159 = £270.30 a month
Each delivered message is charged, so an agent that sends one complete answer instead of three short fragments costs a third as much for the same help.
A proactive appointment reminder
Meta's guidelines do not list appointment reminders as an example. Our reading is that a reminder about an engineer visit the customer has booked qualifies as utility, because it is specific to them and not promotional, which is what Meta's utility definition requires. Meta makes the final call when it reviews the template.
- One reminder: £0.0159
- 2,000 reminders a month: 2,000 × £0.0159 = £31.80
If the customer replies to move the appointment, the window opens and your answers are service messages, counted against the free 1,000 first.
Send the same reminder as a marketing template and it costs 2,000 × £0.0458 = £91.60.
An outage notice to 5,000 customers
Meta's template guidelines give an outage notice as an example of a utility message. 5,000 messages is well under the first volume tier, so it is charged at list rate.
- First notice: 5,000 × £0.0159 = £79.50
- "Service restored" follow-up: another £79.50
- Total for both: £159.00
Suppose a fifth of customers reply and get three answers each:
- 1,000 customers × 3 = 3,000 service messages
- 3,000 − 1,000 free = 2,000 charged, if the allowance was not already used that month
- 2,000 × £0.0159 = £31.80
So the whole incident costs about £190.80 in Meta fees. The same two notices sent as marketing would be 10,000 × £0.0458 = £458.00 before a single reply. We wrote about why an outage message should accept a reply in handling the call spike during a broadband outage.
How to keep the cost down
Get the category right. A utility template costs about a third of a marketing one in the UK (£0.0159 against £0.0458). Keep notices factual and tied to the customer's account or a service they rely on. Meta reviews the category, and its guidelines say a template mixing utility and marketing content is treated as marketing. It can also recategorise an approved template that does not meet its guidelines. One line of promotion at the bottom of a bill reminder nearly triples its cost.
Answer inside the window. Once a customer has messaged you, reply in that window rather than letting it close and sending a template later. Replies count against the free 1,000 first, and you need no template approval to say what the customer actually asked about.
Send fewer, fuller messages. Billing is per delivered message. Design replies to answer the question in one go.
Use the free entry points where they fit. If you run Click-to-WhatsApp ads, the replies in that window are not charged.
Know where the volume tiers start. For UK utility messages the rate falls 5% from 100,001 messages in a month, and 10% from 1,000,001. Authentication tiers start at 300,001. Marketing and service have no tiers. Most operators will never reach them, so budget at list rate.
The bigger point is that the messaging fee is rarely the large number. A notification that lets customers reply and get an answer usually saves far more in calls than it costs to send. We set out that shift in notification to conversation, and what the agent itself costs in how much does conversational AI cost.
To see an agent answering on a live channel, you can try our agent.
