On Wednesday I rewrote three of my own pricing guides. Not because a competitor undercut me, but because a sentence in them — roughly, “2,000 service messages a month, free, ₪0” — was about to become false. Meta had finally posted the rate card for October 1, and the free lane that every Israeli WhatsApp bot has been driving in since late 2024 now has a meter on it.

I wrote about this change in August, when the only thing Meta had said was “rates will follow by September 1.” The rates have followed. So this weekend I did what I should have done before writing anything at all: I pulled the actual message counts for every official WhatsApp number running on my platform, and I worked out what each of them will pay from October.

The short answer surprised me. The long answer is the part that should worry you.

What changes on October 1

Since November 2024, replies inside the 24-hour “customer service window” — the window that opens every time a customer messages a business — have been free on the official WhatsApp Business API. That is the lane a bot lives in. A customer asks “are you open on Friday?”, the bot answers, nobody pays. From October 1, per Meta’s own pricing page, “Meta will charge on a per-message basis for all service messages.” The utility templates that businesses send inside that same window — order confirmations, appointment slots — lose their free status on the same day.

The rate, published on September 1: service messages cost whatever utility messages cost in your market. For Israel, that is $0.0053 per delivered message — a little over one and a half agorot at this week’s exchange rate. Meta added one softener, and it turns out to be the whole story: a free monthly tier of 1,000 service messages per business phone number.

What six Israeli numbers will actually pay

I run a shared inbox platform for small businesses, so I can........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)