WhatsApp Business is changing its per-conversation pricing for businesses. A conversation is a 24-hour thread between a merchant and a user. The company is lowering the rates for utility messages and increasing the rates for marketing messages.
Meta charges businesses through four categories of messages: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balances), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries).
The new utility rates will come into effect from August 4 this year, while the new marketing conversation rates will come into effect from October 4 this year. This is the first update to conversation rates since WhatsApp started charging by category instead of a flat rate for all conversations.
The company charges merchants different fees in different countries: in India, for example, marketing fees have fallen from $0.0099 to $0.0107 (+8%) and utility conversion fees have fallen from $0.0042 to $0.0014 (-67%).
This will encourage businesses to adopt WhatsApp as a primary channel for communicating with their customers.
Over the past year, users have complained about an increase in the volume of WhatsApp messages and spam, and the company has gradually taken steps to protect users from this spam.
Earlier this year, the company began testing restrictions on marketing messages sent to Indian users through its “Per User Marketing Template Message Limit” guideline. While Meta doesn't impose strict limits on the messages brands can send, it does block messages that are “unlikely to be read.”
After a testing period, Meta announced last month that it was expanding these guidelines globally.
“People use WhatsApp for everything from asking product questions to getting boarding passes to getting holiday sale offers. You can never have too much of a good thing, so we're working to find the right combination of tools so that people can continue to have a great experience messaging businesses on WhatsApp,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.
WhatsApp Business is now a major contributor to Meta's revenues: the company announced last year that it had more than 200 million WhatsApp Business users.