Pricing1 September 2026 · 6 min read · Savina Bansal
₹0 a month is real. Here is what you still pay
Pay as you go has no subscription and every feature. Three worked examples show what a month actually costs, line by line, including tax.
Building the platform this article is about
Pay as you go costs ₹0 a month. That is a real number and not a trial: there is no subscription, no card on file waiting to charge you in thirty days, and no feature withheld because you are on the free tier. The chatbot, the shared inbox, click-to-WhatsApp ads, the CRM and the AI agent are all there.
What it is not is free to send. WhatsApp costs money because Meta charges for it, per message, and any platform telling you otherwise is folding that cost into something else. So "₹0 a month" answers the subscription question and leaves the real one open: what does a month of actually using it come to?
Below are three worked examples. They are illustrations, not customers — no business is being described. Every figure is calculated by the same code that runs the calculator on our pricing page, so the arithmetic is the one you would get by typing the same volumes in yourself.
How ₹0 a month works
You top up, from ₹500 at a time, and the balance draws down as you send. There is no monthly fee to earn back before the plan is worth having, which is what makes it the honest starting point for a business that does not yet know its volumes.
Two things are billed. Each message the system sends on your behalf carries a per-message charge, and each WhatsApp template message carries Meta’s own rate for the recipient’s country. Replies you send inside a conversation a customer started are free, unlimited, on every plan.
The trade is straightforward: no fee, and the highest per-message rate of any plan. That is the right side of the trade at low volume and the wrong side at high volume, which is exactly what the examples show.
Example 1 — A boutique running its first campaign
400 marketing messages, 200 order updates, one person answering, all to India. Cheapest plan: Pay as you go.
Plan fee ₹0 · automation ₹150 · WhatsApp messages ₹442. Subtotal ₹592, GST ₹107, total ₹698 for the month.
At this size the subscription is the thing you are avoiding, not the messages. A monthly fee would be most of the bill.
Example 2 — A D2C store with a cart-recovery flow
5,000 marketing messages, 3,000 order updates, two people, all to India. Cheapest plan: Growth.
Plan fee ₹1,099 · automation ₹200 · WhatsApp messages ₹5,207. Subtotal ₹6,506, GST ₹1,171, total ₹7,677 for the month.
The plan fee has stopped being the question. At this volume the messages dominate the bill, so the plan with the lower per-message rate wins even though it costs more up front — and the fee pays for itself several times over.
Example 3 — A clinic that mostly sends reminders
500 marketing messages, 12,000 appointment reminders, three people, all to India. Cheapest plan: Scale.
Plan fee ₹2,599 · automation ₹1,350 · WhatsApp messages ₹1,944. Subtotal ₹5,893, GST ₹1,061, total ₹6,954 for the month.
Note how different this is from example 2 at a similar total. Almost everything here is a reminder — a utility message, which Meta prices far below a marketing one. Two businesses spending the same amount can be sending wildly different volumes.
What actually moves the number
Template category, first. Meta prices a marketing message several times higher than a utility one, so a business built on order updates and reminders spends a fraction of what a broadcast-led business spends at the same message count.
Destination, second. Meta prices by the country your customer is in, not the country you are in. The same campaign to a different market is a different bill.
Then the plan, which changes the per-message rate and the included automation allowance, and tax: 18% GST applies in India and is shown separately above rather than folded in.
Do it with your own numbers
These three shapes are common but none of them is yours. The calculator on our pricing site takes your monthly volumes, your team size and the country you are messaging, prices every plan on them and names the cheapest — including tax, before you talk to anyone.
If the number it gives you does not match what you would work out from Meta’s published card, tell us. That is a bug, not a negotiation.
