Since November 2024, replying to a client inside WhatsApp's 24-hour customer service window has been free. That ends on 1 October 2026: Meta charges per service message — the free-form replies your team or your bot sends inside that window — at the recipient market's utility rate, after 1,000 free service messages per business phone number per month. Utility templates sent inside an open window start billing per message too.
The boring admin part first
If you or your provider has no payment method on file by 30 September, Meta stops delivering service messages once they become chargeable. That is the one item on this page with a deadline attached. Check it today, not on the 1st.
The cost is not the story
A thousand free messages per number per month is a lot of conversation. An agency with a dozen client chats will not notice the bill — unless something on your side is automated and chatty. That is the real exposure: per-conversation billing quietly subsidised bots that sent five messages where one would do. Per-message billing prices that habit honestly.
Which is worth saying plainly, because the wrong reaction to a new line item is to get slower with clients. Response time is the product; nobody ever won a retainer by answering less.
Fewer messages, same answers
The fix is the one good client communication wanted anyway. Batch what can be batched, send what genuinely can't wait, and never send the same nudge twice:
- One digest, not one message per item. We post follow-ups as a single morning digest per chat, on weekdays — per-item nudges plus per-item escalations are how a bot gets muted, and a muted bot chases nothing.
- At most one message a day per open promise, and a change that didn't move the thing the client asked about sends nothing at all.
- Say it once. A status update worth reading is one message; three fragments are three charges and less signal.
And if a client is happy on Telegram, that channel has no per-message economics at all. Meet clients where they are — just stop paying per message for noise you were generating anyway.
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