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What does WhatsApp Business really cost?
Meta charges per message, and its rate card changed on 1 October 2026: service messages are billable beyond 1,000 a month, and utility messages sent in reply have lost their exemption. This calculator applies the rules in force, across all 38 Meta markets.
What Meta charges for, and what it doesn't
Until June 2025, Meta billed 24-hour conversations. Since 1 July 2025, it bills each message sent from a template, one by one. The change looks minor; it moves entirely where you make or lose money.
Since 1 October 2026 only two exemptions remain, where there used to be three.
The first 1,000 service messages each month, per business number, stay free. Beyond that, they are billed at the utility message rate for the market concerned. Until 30 September 2026 they cost nothing, whatever the volume.
Utility messages sent while a service window was open had been free since July 2025. They are billable again. This is the change that weighs most on businesses whose volume is driven by inbound requests: support, order tracking, appointment booking.
A conversation opened from an ad that leads to WhatsApp, or from the WhatsApp button on a Facebook Page, stays free for 72 hours, across every category, marketing messages included. It is now the only lever that wipes out a billing line entirely.
What exactly changes on 1 October 2026
Three changes, announced by Meta on 27 May 2026 with four months' notice and in force since 1 October. Service messages became billable, at the same rate as utility and authentication messages, with 1,000 free messages per business number per month. Utility messages sent in reply within a service window, free since July 2025, became billable again. And nine markets left their “Rest of” region for their own rate card, none in Western Europe. This calculator applies the rate card in force today.
The market is your customer's, not yours
The rate doesn't depend on where your company is based, but on the dialling code of the number receiving the message. A Geneva retailer writing to a French customer pays the France rate, not the Swiss one.
And there is no Swiss rate as such: Switzerland is not a named market at Meta, it falls under Rest of Western Europe, along with Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Portugal and Sweden. The good news: it is markedly cheaper than the named markets next door.
A marketing message at list price costs €0.0490 to Switzerland and the rest of Western Europe, €0.0712 to France, €0.1131 to Germany. A campaign of 50,000 messages: €2,450, €3,560 or €5,655. For identical content.
Volume tiers
On utility, service and authentication messages, the rate falls in bands as your monthly volume rises: −5%, −10%, −15%, −20% and then −25% off the list price. The thresholds themselves vary by market: 100,000 messages for the first tier in Western Europe, 250,000 in Brazil, 25 million in India. Marketing messages get no tiers at all.
The calculator applies the discount band by band: the first messages stay at list price, only those above the threshold move to the reduced rate.
What this calculator does not include
Only what Meta bills you. On top of that come the cost of the platform sending the messages, the cost of integrating it with your CRM, and your teams' time. At Sandra that's a fixed subscription: what you see above really is the variable part of your budget, the part that follows your volumes.
The rates are those of the reading shown under the table. Meta undertakes to give a month's notice before changing a rate card, but rate cards move, and that's why this page carries a date.
Shall we look at your real volumes?
The gap between the theoretical bill and the real one comes down to scenario choices: who opens the conversation, in what order, inside which window. That is exactly the work we do with you.