What WhatsApp Business API messages actually cost in India
Meta charges per conversation, your provider charges per message, and the two are not the same number. How the pricing actually stacks up, and the part of the bill nobody quotes you.
· 6 min read
The confusing part of WhatsApp pricing in India is that there are two bills underneath it, charged by two different people, on two different units. Almost every quote you will be given collapses them into one number, and which parts got collapsed is the difference between a predictable cost and a surprise.
Meta charges per conversation
Meta does not bill your business per message. It bills whoever provides your API access per conversation, and a conversation is a 24 hour window opened by the first template you send into it. Everything inside that window is covered by the one charge, however many messages it takes.
Conversations are priced by category, and the categories are what actually drive the bill:
- Marketing — offers, launches, anything promotional. The most expensive category by a distance, and the one a campaign spends.
- Utility — order confirmations, shipping updates, payment reminders. Substantially cheaper than marketing, and where most transactional messaging belongs.
- Authentication — one-time codes, and nothing else.
- Service — your replies to a customer who messaged you first. Meta stopped charging for these in July 2025.
Your provider charges for something else
On top of Meta’s conversation charge sits whatever your provider adds, and this is where the quotes diverge. The three shapes you will see:
- A platform fee plus a per-message charge. A monthly subscription, and a few paise for each message on top.
- A flat fee with messages included. One number a month, up to some ceiling.
- A markup on Meta’s own rate.Sometimes disclosed, sometimes not. This is the one to ask about directly, because it is invisible until you reconcile a bill against Meta’s published rates.
The question nobody puts on the pricing page
Ask when you are charged, rather than how much.
Most providers count a message when it is sent. That sounds like a technicality until you look at a contact list that has been collected over three or four years. A meaningful slice of those numbers no longer receives anything: people change numbers, numbers get recycled, handsets never come back online. Billed on send, you pay for every one of them, on every campaign, indefinitely — and nothing on the invoice tells you it happened.
Billed on delivery, those messages cost nothing, and the list cleans itself as a side effect of being used.
What Sendrix does
We charge on delivery. A credit is reserved when a message is accepted and settled when WhatsApp says what happened to it; anything undelivered is refunded to your balance automatically, without anybody raising a ticket. Replies inside the 24 hour window cost nothing, because Meta stopped charging for them and we did not keep charging for them. Meta’s conversation charges are included in the per-message price, so there is no second bill.
The two plans are ₹2,000 a month plus 15 paise a delivered message, or ₹3,000 a month flat. Which is cheaper depends entirely on volume, and the crossing point is about 6,700 messages a month — the pricing page has a slider that works it out for yours.
A checklist worth taking to any provider
- Am I charged when a message is sent, or when it arrives?
- What happens to the money for a message that is never delivered?
- Is there a markup on Meta’s conversation rate?
- Does replying to a customer cost anything?
- Whose WhatsApp Business Account is the number on — mine or yours?
That last one has nothing to do with price until the day you leave. It is covered in connecting a number, and it is worth settling before you start rather than after.