Meta starts metering the free-form WhatsApp replies a bot sends on 1 October

The unit you have to count changes. Free-form replies inside an open 24-hour customer service window have not been charged since 1 November 2024, so no one has needed a send counter ^[5]. From October the counter runs per outbound message, per business phone number, per calendar month, resetting to zero with nothing carried forward ^[8].

Reply count is what carries the post's worked example. 2,000 inbound conversations answered with roughly three bot messages each is 6,000 service messages; 1,000 are free, and 5,000 at Rs 0.1150 is Rs 575, the figure the post gives ^[1][12]. Six replies per conversation instead of three gives 12,000 messages, 11,000 chargeable, Rs 1,265 ^[2]. So the figure to pull out of your own logs is messages sent per inbound conversation.

Because the allowance is flat, it matters less as volume grows. The post puts 50,000 service messages a month at about Rs 5,635 ^[13]; 49,000 chargeable at Rs 0.1150 is Rs 5,635 exactly, and the free thousand covers 2 per cent of the traffic ^[3]. The post advises against splitting numbers purely to farm the allowance, while noting that genuinely separate support and sales numbers each get their own 1,000 ^[17].

Category still dominates outbound spend. Marketing to an Indian number is Rs 0.8631 per delivered template against Rs 0.1150 for utility, a factor of 7.5 ^[6][4]. 2,000 shipping updates a month is Rs 230; a blast to 5,000 opted-in contacts is Rs 4,315.50, which the post rounds to Rs 4,315 ^[15][5]. An order confirmation approved under the marketing category costs 7.5 times the same text approved as utility ^[14].

One failure mode is worth setting up for before the date. Per Meta's warning as reported in the post, an account with no payment method still delivers its first 1,000 service messages each month, and the 1,001st is simply not delivered ^[9].

The rates come from a post by a developer at ZoopCoder, a small Indian shop that builds WhatsApp chatbots as a paid service, who states that every per-message rate quoted is Meta's own and is billed by Meta directly to the WhatsApp Business account ^[1]. The same post says platform pricing has changed twice in eighteen months and that most of the India pricing pages a search turns up still describe the 2023 model ^[16]. Its cited source is Meta's pricing documentation, last updated 10 September 2026, and the INR rate card CSV linked from it ^[2].