2024 WhatsApp Business API Price Update: What You Need To Know

In this blog, we will be going over the recent changes to the WhatsApp Business API pricing as announced by Meta. We will give a look at the changes being made and the reasoning behind doing so.

Where’s the WhatsApp Business API pricing change happening?

The pricing changes announced by Meta are going to affect conversations between businesses and their customers. Conversations, in this case, refer to 24-hour message windows between the two parties.

The pricing update primarily affects three key categories of conversations: marketing, utility and authentication.

Marketing Messages: These refer to messages send proactively to promote products, offer discounts, or spark customer engagement through interactive content.

Utility Messages: These cater to post-purchase customer journeys, informing them about order confirmations, delivery updates, and similar transactional needs.

Authentication Messages: These let you authenticate users by sending OTPs directly to their WhatsApp chat. This can also be repeated multiple times within the login process.

In short, the cost of sending Utility messages and Authentication messages is going down, while the cost of Marketing messages is going up.

Click here for the updated rate sheets for different regions and messages.

Why is Meta changing WhatsApp pricing?

The logic behind doing so is to incentivize businesses towards a more targetted form of promotions on WhatsApp rather than sending bulk promotions to all their contacts. The latter results in a lower ROI and leverages WhatsApp’s reach to try and gain brand awareness or engagement. However this often simply results in a poor customer experience or them just ignoring the message. The new costs will make personalized marketing more lucrative, owing to its higher return on investment. This will also shift the focus towards WhatsApp’s potential as a personal messaging service, making business customize their marketing for segments of or individual customers.

This also plays into the changes that Meta announced limiting the number of messages you can send in bulk at a time. This aims to reduce the amount of spam from businesses by making untargeted bulk messaging costlier and less effective overall.

Reducing utility costs also helps businesses engage with their customers at scale on WhatsApp without having to worry about incurring a high cost from back-and-forth messaging. Thus businesses can directly reach out providing updates and information to customers as required. The same can be said about authentication messages letting businesses use OTPs at different stages of a login process at lower costs.

To get an idea of the scale of these changes:

Costs for marketing messages are increasing by

Costs for utility messages are reducing by

Costs for marketing messages are increasing by

Costs for authentication messages are reducing by

Concluding,

As you can see the 2024 WhatsApp Business pricing update signals a shift towards encouraging personalized messages smoother post-purchase interactions on the platform. By adapting your communication strategy based on these changes and staying informed about future developments, you can leverage WhatsApp Business to solidify your customer relationships and drive business growth.

At kwiqreply, we help you leverage SaaS tools for customer communication. kwiqreply offers dynamic features such as bulk messaging, customizable templates, AI-powered chatbots, and much more.

So, seize the opportunity, and propel your business toward sustainable growth and success! Know more about kwiqreply by clicking the link below.

Click here to book a free demo and let us show you how you can do more business online