What Meta charges, as of today

Until mid-2025, Meta charged for a conversation: a 24-hour window opened by the first message, with everything inside it included. That is the model almost every comparison article, pricing calculator and vendor page still describes.

On 1 July 2025 Meta deprecated conversation-based pricing and replaced it with per-message pricing. Each message you send is now priced on its own, by category and by the recipient’s market.

The practical consequence is about campaigns, not about support. A long support thread used to cost one conversation and now costs nothing at all, because replies inside the window are service messages. A marketing blast used to cost one conversation per recipient and still does — one message each. What changed is everything in between: a utility sequence of three messages is three charges, where it used to be one.

• Marketing — promotions, offers, re-engagement, product news. The dearest category in every market, and the one Meta reviews most carefully at template approval.
• Utility — something the customer asked for or transacted: an order update, an appointment reminder, a delivery notification, a receipt.
• Authentication — one-time passcodes.
• Service — a free-form reply inside the 24-hour window that the customer’s own message opened. This is the category almost all inbox traffic falls into.

Marketing, utility and authentication messages require a template Meta has approved in advance. A service reply does not: inside the window you type what you like.

The window opens when the customer messages you, and it is measured from their last inbound message. A reply from you does not extend it. That detail is worth stating because getting it backwards would let a business hold a window open by talking to itself, and because it is the difference between a free reply and a refused one.

Once the window has closed, the only way to reach that person again is an approved template — which is charged, in its own category. ChatBridge24 checks the window before you send rather than after Meta refuses, because Meta’s own error for this is accurate and useless to an agent mid-conversation.

This is where almost every page on the subject is wrong, so here are the three dates in order.

1 November 2024 — the old allowance ended. Meta used to give every business 1,000 free conversations a month. On that date service conversations became free for all businesses, with no cap, and the 1,000 figure stopped existing. A great deal of marketing copy — including at least one Meta-owned FAQ page — still repeats it. It has not been true for nearly two years.

1 July 2025 — the conversation stopped being a billing unit at all. See above.

1 October 2026 — a new allowance, and it is not the old one. Meta introduces a free monthly tier of service messages: every business phone number gets 1,000 free service messages a month, and Meta charges from the 1,001st service message delivered. Unused messages do not roll over.

The figure is identical to the dead tier and it is a different thing in two ways that both reduce it:

• The unit is a message, not a window. A busy support thread is dozens of messages inside one 24-hour window. Under the old tier that was one conversation; under the new one it is dozens of service messages. The new allowance is far smaller in practice despite the identical number.
• The grain is the phone number, not the account. It is 1,000 per business phone number per month, so a business running three numbers has three allowances rather than one shared pool.

Meta also states that there are no volume tiers for service messages — past the free 1,000 they are charged at the same per-market rate as utility and authentication.

Anything that copies the number across without converting the unit is wrong by an order of magnitude. If you are reading a vendor’s page that says you get 1,000 free conversations, you are reading a page written before November 2024.

Rates are per message, per category, per the recipient’s market, and Meta changes them. We are not going to print a table we cannot stand behind for the quarter: a rate card that is out of date is worse than no rate card, which is the entire reason this page exists.

Read them at the source, on the Pricing page of Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform developer documentation. One note from our own experience of checking it: the figures live in a block that some text-extraction tools drop silently — if a fetch of that page appears not to mention the free tier at all, open it in a browser.

What we can tell you without a table: whatever Meta charges you, we add nothing to it. Your WhatsApp Business Account is your own and Meta bills you directly on it. Our price is per connected number, per month, and it is the only thing we charge for.