How Much Does a WhatsApp Broadcast Cost?

A WhatsApp broadcast cost is a per-message fee that Meta charges your business each time a template message is delivered to a customer — the amount depends on the template's category and the recipient's country, and several kinds of message are free. Meta's own wording is unambiguous: "You are only charged when a template message is delivered" (Meta, WhatsApp pricing).

There are really two costs behind every broadcast, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion:

1. Meta's per-message fee — WhatsApp charges for each delivered template message. This is billed by Meta, not by us.
2. Your software plan — what you pay ConvoFly for the tools that build, send and track campaigns. It is billed by us, separately from the WhatsApp fee, and it is not a markup on Meta's per-message rate.

This guide is about the first one, because that is what "how much does a broadcast cost" almost always means. It covers how the billing works, exactly which messages are free, why nobody should quote you a single global price, and how to estimate a campaign before you send it.

How Meta charges: per message, on delivery

Since 1 July 2025, WhatsApp charges per message. Before that date, messages were bundled into 24-hour "conversations" and you paid per conversation; that conversation-based model is now deprecated (Meta, WhatsApp pricing). If you are reading an older guide that talks about "conversation pricing", "user-initiated conversations" or "1,000 free conversations a month", it is describing a system that no longer exists.

Two consequences of the per-message model matter for budgeting:

• You are billed on delivery, not on send. If a number is invalid, not on WhatsApp, or the send fails outright, there is nothing to pay for it. A list with dead numbers wastes your time and your daily messaging allowance, but it does not inflate your Meta bill.
• A longer conversation now costs more than it used to. Under conversation pricing, a back-and-forth exchange inside 24 hours was one charge. Under per-message pricing, each template you send is its own charge — although free-form replies inside an open window remain free, which is covered below.

There is no universal free tier and no free monthly allowance on the pricing page. Any "X free messages per month" figure you see quoted should be checked against Meta's live page before you plan a budget around it.

The four message categories

Every message your business sends falls into one of four buckets, and the bucket decides whether money changes hands:

• Marketing — sales, launches, offers, re-engagement. Charged on delivery. Most broadcasts are marketing messages, so this is the category that dominates a campaign budget.
• Utility — order confirmations, shipping updates, appointment reminders: messages about a transaction the customer already made. Charged when delivered outside a customer service window; "Utility templates delivered within an open customer service window are free".
• Authentication — one-time passcodes and login verification. Charged outside the window, and Meta operates volume-tiered rates for this category.
• Service / non-template — ordinary typed replies from your team. "All non-template messages are free", and they can only be sent while a customer service window is open.

All four quotations above come from Meta's WhatsApp pricing documentation. Meta, not you, has the final say on which category a template belongs to — a promotional message submitted as "utility" gets re-categorised, so writing a discount code into a shipping-update template is not a pricing trick, it is a rejection waiting to happen. See Meta's template guidelines for what each category is allowed to contain.

Which messages cost money and which are free

This is the single table worth bookmarking. Every row is drawn from Meta's pricing page:

Read down the "Charged" column and the pattern is clear: you pay to start conversations, and you do not pay to continue them. That single sentence should shape how you design campaigns.

The 24-hour customer service window

A customer service window is a 24-hour period that opens the moment a customer sends you a message. While it is open, your team can reply with ordinary typed messages at no charge, and utility templates delivered inside it are free too. When it closes, the only way to reach that customer again is an approved template — and outside the window, marketing, utility and authentication templates are all billable.

The window is the reason a broadcast that asks a question is worth more than one that merely announces something. A broadcast ending in "reply YES and we'll hold one for you" costs you one marketing message per recipient, and every person who replies opens 24 hours of free two-way conversation. The same list, sent a message that gives nobody a reason to answer, costs exactly the same and buys you none of that. ConvoFly can also auto-reply to the people who respond, so the free window gets used even when nobody is at the keyboard.

The 72-hour free entry point

Meta operates a free entry point conversation: when someone reaches you through a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or a call-to-action button on your Facebook Page, all messages in that thread are free for 72 hours — three full days, not 24 hours (Meta, WhatsApp pricing).

For an online store this is the cheapest acquisition channel WhatsApp offers, because the ad spend buys you both the contact and three days of unmetered messaging with them. It is also why ad-driven opt-ins tend to have a better cost per outcome than list-uploaded contacts, who cost a marketing message every time you want to reach them.

Why we will not quote you a price per message

Because there is no such number. Meta does not publish per-country rates inline on the pricing page — it links downloadable rate cards, and it revises them periodically. A rate varies by the recipient's country and by the template category, so a "WhatsApp costs X per message" figure is meaningless without both.

Any article, ourselves included, that prints a specific cent figure is giving you a number that was true on the day someone copied it and may not be true now. The reliable move is to open Meta's pricing page, download the current rate card, and look up the two or three countries you actually send to. That takes about five minutes and it is the only figure worth putting in a spreadsheet.

How to estimate a campaign's cost before you send

The arithmetic is straightforward once you have the right rate. Do it in this order:

1. Open Meta's pricing page and download the current rate card for your region.
2. Look up the Marketing rate for each country you are sending to — not the utility or authentication rate, since a promotional broadcast will be categorised as marketing.
3. In ConvoFly, build your segment and click Preview recipients. That gives you the exact headcount rather than a guess, and it already excludes opted-out contacts.
4. If your list spans several countries, split the headcount by country — a segment condition on the city or country attribute will do it — because a single blended rate will be wrong in both directions.
5. Multiply each slice: recipients × that country's marketing rate, then add the slices together.
6. Subtract nothing for undelivered messages when budgeting — treat the full headcount as billable and let the delivery failures be a small refund rather than a planning assumption.

Run the same calculation on a drip campaign by multiplying by the number of steps, remembering that a drip stops the moment a contact replies — so the later steps go to fewer people than the first.

What ConvoFly charges, and what it does not

ConvoFly connects directly to WhatsApp's official Cloud API, which means Meta bills the per-message fees to the payment method on your own WhatsApp Business account. We do not resell messages and we do not add a per-message markup on top of Meta's rate. What you pay ConvoFly is separate from that, and it covers the composer, segments, drip campaigns, shared inbox, automations and reporting — check your current plan for those details.

One practical benefit of billing sitting on your own Meta account: if the payment method has a problem, the failure is visible to you directly. ConvoFly surfaces it as a banner so a stalled broadcast does not leave you guessing whether the software broke or the card expired.

Seven ways to keep the bill down

• Target tighter. A relevant 800-person segment costs a fraction of a 5,000-person blast and converts better per message sent.
• Retarget instead of re-blasting. Follow up only the people who didn't reply or didn't read. A second send to the full list charges you again for everyone who already converted.
• Design broadcasts to open a window. Ask a question. Every reply gives you 24 hours of free messaging with a warm customer.
• Use utility templates for genuinely transactional updates. Delivered inside an open window they are free — but never dress a promotion up as a utility message, because Meta re-categorises it.
• Lean on Click-to-WhatsApp ads for acquisition. The 72-hour free entry point makes the first three days of a new contact's relationship cost nothing in message fees.
• Clean your list. Undelivered messages are not billed, but they drag your quality rating, and a poor rating restricts how many people you can reach per day — a cost that does not show up on an invoice.
• Cap your frequency. Over-messaging earns blocks. Set a limit on how often one person can get a marketing message; see opt-outs and frequency caps.

Three costly assumptions to avoid

• "Broadcasts are free like on my phone." The 256-contact broadcast list in the consumer WhatsApp app is free, but it only reaches people who have saved your number in their address book. The API broadcasts described here reach anyone who opted in — and they are billed. The distinction is spelled out in broadcast vs broadcast list.
• "I'll send a big list once and judge the cost from that." Your messaging tier may cap how many unique people you can reach in 24 hours — new numbers start at 250 — so a first big send may spread across days and your first invoice will not reflect a full campaign.
• "Utility is always cheaper, so I'll send everything as utility." Category is assigned on the template's content, and misfiled templates get re-categorised or rejected under WhatsApp's Business Messaging Policy. The saving is not available to be gamed.