What 10 WhatsApp API providers charge, and where we lose

What does Meta actually charge per WhatsApp message?

Meta bills per message — not per 24-hour conversation, which is how it worked until 1 July 2025 — and publishes the whole card openly. A marketing message to a customer in India is ₹0.8631. That is the floor. Nobody can charge less than it, so every difference between providers is a platform fee, a per-seat charge, a markup, or a feature you have to upgrade to reach.

Note that Meta prices by your customer's country, not yours. An Indian business messaging Dubai pays the UAE rate. Every figure in this post is a marketing message to India, one seat unless stated, excluding GST.

Where the zero-fee plan wins, and by how much

Of the ten providers, none publishes a plan with no monthly fee that still includes the full product. Ohanvi's Pay as you go is ₹0 a month, prepaid, and carries every feature — chatbot, shared inbox, CRM, API, AI agent, social publishing. Messages cost ₹1.0357 each.

That is the whole advantage at the small end, and it is just subtraction: a business sending 1,000 marketing messages a month pays about ₹1,036 with us. Gallabox's Basic plan is ₹2,399 before the first message is sent. Interakt's Growth is ₹2,799. respond.io's Growth is $159. The monthly fee dominates until volume gets large enough to outweigh it.

For one seat, that holds until roughly 14,680 marketing messages a month. For a team of five it holds until about 44,800, because our Scale plan includes five seats where most rivals start charging for the fourth or seventh.

How does pay-as-you-go WhatsApp pricing work?

There is no subscription and no card charged monthly. You top up from ₹500, and every message draws down the balance at the published rate — ₹1.0357 for a marketing message to India, ₹0.1380 for a utility one. Send nothing in a month and you are charged nothing.

In practice that means a business testing WhatsApp properly for the first time can send 100 marketing messages for about ₹104 all in, or 1,000 for about ₹1,036. There is no plan to pick, no annual commitment, and no upgrade needed to reach a feature — the chatbot, the shared inbox, the CRM, the API and the AI agent are all on the ₹0 plan.

Compare that with what the alternative costs before you send anything: Gallabox Basic is ₹2,399 a month, Interakt Growth ₹2,799, Wati Growth ₹2,999, respond.io Growth $159. On any of those, a month in which you send 100 messages costs the same as a month in which you send 10,000. That is the difference a zero-fee tier makes at the bottom of the market, and it is the clearest single advantage in this whole comparison.

The honest limits, because they matter. Pay as you go carries the highest per-message price of our five plans and no included volume, it is one seat, and automated messages are billed at 75 paise each with no monthly allowance. Support is email inside 48 hours rather than same-day.

And it stops being the right plan eventually. Because it has the highest message price, a subscription overtakes it once volume is large enough for the price difference to outweigh the plan fee — at roughly 11,590 marketing messages a month, Starter becomes cheaper. Staying on Pay as you go past that point means overpaying us, so it is worth putting the number in writing.

Where we stop being the cheapest: volume

Above that crossover, providers that pass Meta's rate through at cost win, and it is not close at the top end. DelightChat states "We charge WhatsApp's rates as is, with no markup." 360dialog states "no markup on Meta fees, no hidden costs." respond.io bills Meta's fees direct. Our own price is Meta's rate plus a percentage that falls with the plan, from ₹1.0357 on Pay as you go down to ₹0.9063 on Pro.

A flat monthly fee plus Meta at cost is a straight line with a lower slope than ours. Past a certain volume a lower slope always wins, whatever the intercept. If you are sending a hundred thousand marketing messages a month, an at-cost provider will beat us and you should model it rather than take our word for it.

What we would say in our own defence is narrow: the at-cost claim is about the message, not the invoice. DelightChat caps marketing contacts at 2,500 a month on its entry plan and charges $10 per additional thousand. Zoko adds $0.015 per conversation on its entry tier. Gallabox does not publish a per-message figure at all, so "at cost" there is our assumption in their favour, not their statement. Check the caps as carefully as the rate.

Where we stop being competitive: seats

This is the one that surprised us, and it is worse for us than the volume story. Interakt publishes unlimited agents on its marketing and support plans. AiSensy and Zoko say the same. Ohanvi charges ₹499 per seat beyond the plan's included count.

A flat fee with unlimited agents compounds against a per-seat charge, so the gap opens with every person you add. At five seats and 10,000 messages we are ahead — about ₹11,827 against Interakt Growth's ₹12,379 and respond.io Growth's ₹23,736. At eight seats and the same volume we are behind: roughly ₹13,324 against ₹12,379.

We looked hard at raising the included seat count to close this and decided against it, which is worth being straight about: most of the businesses we sell to are Indian SMBs whose WhatsApp team is under ten people, and discounting the seat ladder for all of them to win an uncommon deal is not a trade that makes sense for us. So Pro includes 10 seats and each one after that is ₹499.

Past 10 people, a per-seat charge is simply the wrong shape and no published price of ours wins against a flat unlimited-agent fee. Above that we stop publishing one: it becomes a custom plan with unlimited seats, scoped against what you are actually paying now. If you are running a contact centre with twenty agents on WhatsApp, do not buy Pro and ten extra seats — talk to us, or genuinely go and check an unlimited-agent platform, because on the published rate cards they will cost you less than our list price.

The fairness point cuts both ways, though: unlimited agents is not the norm, and several vendors charge far more per seat than we do. Wati's Pro plan is ₹6,499 a month with five users and ₹1,299 for each one after; Business is ₹18,499 with ₹2,199 a user. Gallabox charges ₹1,200 per extra user on Essential and ₹1,500 on Advanced. respond.io charges $12 a user on Starter and $20 on Growth. And Wati's ₹2,999 Growth plan states "3 Users Included. No additional users" — you cannot buy a fourth at any price, you upgrade to a plan costing more than twice as much. At ₹499 we are mid-table: beaten by the unlimited-agent platforms, well under everyone else.

Which features are gated behind a higher plan?

A cheaper plan that cannot do the job is not cheaper. Read only the column you would actually buy, and check three things in it: can you build an automated flow, can you connect your existing tools, can you call the API.

On the published pages we read: Interakt's free Starter excludes public APIs, chatbot flows and advanced webhooks. Wati's ₹2,999 Growth plan connects "any 1 Channel", allows "2 select Commerce/CRM integrations" and gives "10k API calls/mon, No Webhooks". Gallabox Basic caps active flows at five with no AI agents and a three-user hard cap. respond.io's Starter excludes the Developer API, Workflows automation, AI Agents and broadcasts. AiSensy offers the API at no platform fee but sells the chatbot builder at ₹2,500 a month and the AI agent at ₹3,500.

Every Ohanvi plan carries every feature, including the ₹0 one. What changes between tiers is volume, seats, support speed and the per-message price. That is the claim we would most like you to test, because it is the one that is trivially checkable and would be embarrassing to get wrong.

Are Twilio and 360dialog cheaper?

Twilio and 360dialog are cheaper per message than any platform in this comparison, us included. Twilio charges $0.005 a message on top of Meta's fees with no monthly platform fee at all. 360dialog charges €49 a month per number and states no markup on Meta's rates.

They are also not the same kind of product. Both hand you an API. There is no shared inbox, no CRM, no campaign builder, no chatbot canvas — you build or buy that separately. If you have engineers and want the cheapest possible path to sending, a gateway is very likely the right answer, and comparing our subscription to theirs on price alone would be misleading in our favour.

One we could not price

Infobip's WhatsApp pricing page returned an HTTP 403, so nothing is quoted for them at all. We are not going to fill that gap from a third-party comparison article or from memory — that is exactly how the previous version of this page ended up asserting things about competitors that were not true, and it was taken down for it.

Four vendors publish no per-message figure either: Wati, Gallabox, DelightChat and respond.io all state that message charges apply on top without printing the rate. Everywhere that matters above, we have modelled them at Meta's rate exactly — the most favourable reading available to them. If any of the four in fact adds a margin, their real total is higher than the figure we have credited them with, not lower.

Run it yourself, in about ten minutes

Take your real numbers: marketing messages a month, utility messages a month, and how many people need to log in. Then for each vendor, add the monthly fee, the per-seat cost for everyone past the included count, and the per-message rate times your volume. Do not compare headline prices; compare that total.

Then check the two things a price cannot tell you. Whose name is the WhatsApp Business Account registered in — if it is the provider's, your number and its sending reputation are not portable, and no discount compensates for that. And can you export contacts and conversation history yourself, today, without asking.

Our full rate card and a calculator that totals a month from your own volumes are on the pricing page. If a figure we have published about another provider is wrong, tell us and we will correct it — the underlying data carries the source URL and the date we checked it, and the site refuses to build once it is more than ninety days old.