Conversation-Based Pricing

How It Works

WhatsApp Business API conversations fall into two categories that are priced differently:

• User-initiated, like customer care and general support inquiries.
• Business-initiated, like post purchase notifications.

All conversations are measured in 24-hour increments, or "sessions", that start whenever the first message is delivered by a business. The first message can be a response to a user inquiry or a business-initiated message template being delivered.

Charges for conversations are based on the end user’s phone number. Rates for business-initiated conversations and user-initiated conversations vary by market (country or region). See Rates for specific pricing information.

The first 1,000 conversations each month will be free, so your business can start to build experiences your customers will love before having to pay. In addition, conversations will not be charged when a user messages a business using a call-to-action button on Ads that click to WhatsApp or a Facebook Page CTA.

Examples

For the examples that follow, we’ll use a hypothetical user, Anne Bodelac, a customer of Commercial Air, a hypothetical airline, and Kicks, a fictitious online shoe retailer. Anne prefers to use WhatsApp to message businesses because it’s the fastest way to get the support and information she needs. Commercial Air and Kicks know many of their customers prefer to connect via WhatsApp, so they’re ready to respond to inquiries or send important updates via messaging.

User-Initiated Conversations

Scenario: Customer care or general support inquiries in a single 24-hour conversation session.

Our user, Anne Bodelac, messages Commercial Air with a question about an upcoming reservation. When Commercial Air’s reply message is delivered, it starts the 24-hour conversation session. In this scenario, all additional messages are free within the 24-hour session. This encourages Commercial Air to follow-up with support inquiries in a timely manner, while providing users the ability to exchange as many messages as needed to resolve concerns within the 24-hour session. If Commercial Air continues to exchange messages with Anne after the initial 24-hour conversation session has ended, they’ll incur costs related to a new conversation. They’ll also be required to send a message template to start a new conversation if it’s been more than 24 hours since Anne’s last message, which will be charged as a business-initiated conversation.

In this scenario, Anne gets the info she needs about her reservation and Commercial Air pays for one user-initiated conversation.

Scenario: User-initiated conversation leads to two conversations with a message template required.

Anne wants to check on an order she placed with Kicks, an online shoe retailer. She does so at 1:13pm. Kicks has a bot set-up to reply to basic order inquiries, and responds to Anne with delivery details at 1:13pm. As a follow up the next day, the Kicks bot lets Anne know that her order has been delivered at 3:45pm.

When the Kicks bot replies to Anne more than 24 hours after the first message confirming the delivery ETA, it starts a new conversation. Kicks also has to use a message template because it’s been more than 24 hours since Anne’s last message.

In this scenario, Kicks pays for one user-initiated and one business-initiated conversation.

Business-Initiated Conversations

Scenario: Business initiates the delivery of a message template.

When a flight is delayed or its status changes, Commercial Air alerts customers who have opted in to receive notifications using a message template. Two message templates sent in a single 24-hour conversation session result in one business-initiated conversation charge.

In this scenario, Commercial Air wants to let Anne know that her flight is delayed by 30 minutes.
Commercial Air will be charged for one business-initiated conversation for the delivery of these two message templates to Anne within a 24 hour conversation session.

Scenario: Business-initiated with user reply leading to single conversation .

When a customer places a new order from Kicks, the online retailer sends a text message to confirm the order has been received, and asks the customer if they’d like to receive notification when it ships. The customer selects Yes and opts into receiving additional order notifications.

In this scenario, Kicks pays for a single, business-initiated conversation. If the user replies more than 24 hours after the initial business message delivery and that is followed by a business reply, that will result in a new, user-initiated conversation.

Rates