From 1 October 2026, Meta starts charging for service messages. Replies you send inside the 24-hour window after a customer messages you have been free since November 2024. That ends. From October they are billed per message at your country’s utility rate, which in India is ₹0.13.
If most of your WhatsApp volume is support conversations rather than campaigns, this is the first time that traffic has a line item. Here is what actually changes, and how to work out your own number before the bill shows up.
What a service message is
When a customer messages you first, a 24-hour window opens. Anything you send back inside that window is a service message. No template needed, no approval, just a normal reply from your team or an auto reply.
That is the bulk of what a support inbox does: answering a question about an order, confirming a booking, sorting out a delivery problem. Until now it cost nothing.
What changes on 1 October 2026
The window itself does not change. You still get 24 hours, you still reply freely without a template. What changes is that each of those replies is now billed at the utility rate.
| Category | India rate | Before 1 Oct 2026 | From 1 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service (reply in 24h window) | ₹0.13 | Free | Charged |
| Utility | ₹0.13 | Charged | Charged |
| Authentication | ₹0.145 | Charged | Charged |
| Marketing | ₹0.88 | Charged | Charged |
Marketing, utility and authentication rates are unchanged. Only the service column moves, and it moves from zero to the utility rate.
What it costs you
The maths is simple: count the replies your team sends inside the 24-hour window in a month, multiply by ₹0.13.
A shop answering 50 customer conversations a day, three replies each, is about 4,500 service messages a month. That is roughly ₹585 a month that used to be ₹0.
A busier team on 500 conversations a day with the same three replies lands near 45,000 service messages, or about ₹5,850 a month.
Real, but not the cliff some people are expecting. At ₹0.13 a message it takes serious volume before this rivals what you already spend on marketing templates at ₹0.88.
What to do about it
Three things worth doing before October, none of them dramatic.
Work out your actual number. Pull your reply volume for a normal month and multiply. Most teams find it smaller than they feared. Guessing is what makes this feel scary.
Look at your auto replies. An auto reply is a service message. If you fire three automated messages at every inbound, that is now three charges instead of zero. Keep the ones that do real work and drop the filler.
Check whether your provider passes the rate through. This is the part that decides whether the change costs you ₹585 or ₹700 for the same traffic. Meta charges ₹0.13. If your platform adds 10 to 20 percent on top, you pay their markup on a cost that did not exist last month.
Where Boldally stands
We pass Meta’s rates through at cost. Service messages were free until 30 September 2026 and cost ₹0.13 from 1 October, and that is exactly what lands on your bill. We add nothing to it.
That is the whole position. We charge a monthly platform fee, published on the pricing page, and we do not take a cut of your message spend. When Meta’s rates move, your cost moves by exactly that much.
If you want to model your own volume, the WhatsApp cost calculator works it out per category. For the full rate picture, see WhatsApp Business API pricing in India.