Starting 1st February 2022, WhatsApp will be switching to a new business model for their WhatsApp product. At present, you are only billed by WhatsApp if you send a message outside of the 24 hour window, a so called “Template Message”. Read about their new conversational pricing.
From the 1st February 2022, WhatsApp will switch to charging per conversation rather than per message. All conversations are measured in 24-hour increments, or “sessions”, that start whenever the first message from a business is delivered. The first message can be initiated by the business (business-initiated) or a business reply within 24 hours of a user message (user-initiated). A user is defined as the person or entity with whom the business is messaging.
The first 1000 conversations per month are free-of-charge. After this, the charges levied by WhatsApp for conversations are based on the user’s phone number. Rates for business-initiated conversations and user-initiated conversations vary by market (country or region). This is billed by WhatsApp to us in EURO regardless of which country you are based in. We will therefore use the market exchange rate on the 1st of each month to bill you these costs in your local currency so you continue to receive one bill in your local currency.
QContact continue to offer access to WhatsApp free-of-charge – we do not charge platform access or messaging fees. The only fees you will be billed for are the exact charges levied by WhatsApp converted into your local currency.
You can find the full pricing matrix and some worked examples at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/pricing/conversationpricing
For your convenience here are the headline rates for our main markets with local exchange rates (as of 24th November 2021)
Country | Business-Initiated Rate | User-Initiated Rate |
South Africa | € 0.0232 (~R0.41) | € 0.0139 (~R0.25) |
Spain | € 0.0509 | € 0.0305 |
United Kingdom | € 0.0536 (~£0.045) | € 0.0321 (~£0.027) |
United States | € 0.0122 (~$0.014) | € 0.0073 (~$0.0082) |