Starting October 1st 2026, Meta will charge for every response sent via WhatsApp. Here’s how Suricata AI can help.
⚠️ Meta has announced that, effective October 1, 2026, it will charge for every response your business sends via WhatsApp (whether sent by a bot or a human agent). The cost will vary depending on the country where the customer is registered.
📢 How will the new pricing work?
ℹ️ From now until September 30, 2026, responding to customers via WhatsApp remains free and unlimited.
ℹ️ Starting October 1, 2026, every response sent to customers will be charged.
ℹ️ This is not a per-conversation fee. Instead, Meta will charge for each response (each message) your business sends. For example, if your business sends 8 replies to a customer, you will be charged for all 8 messages.
📢 To make it even clearer, here’s a real example:
👉 A customer contacts you, and the conversation consists of 15 messages in total: 7 from the customer and 8 replies from your business.
ℹ️ The cost for your replies will be:
8 responses × USD 0.026 (Argentina pricing; see attached table*).
Total cost: USD 0.21 for those responses.
👉 Incoming customer messages will continue to be free of charge.
👉 Message templates (promotions and notifications) are already billed today, and this pricing remains unchanged.
Suricata’s IA Recommendations to Keep Your Costs as Low as Possible
The Suricata AI team has prepared the following recommendations to help you minimize your messaging costs, in order of priority:
1) Consolidate bot responses: Combine information that is currently sent across multiple messages into a single response. Same content, fewer charges.
2) Use interactive buttons and lists: Reducing back-and-forth interactions means fewer billable messages.
3) Adopt proactive communication: Sending a single outbound notification (one charge) to inform customers about service interruptions or planned outages is more cost-effective than handling multiple reactive conversations afterward.
4) Apply the same best practices across your support team: Train agents to provide complete answers in a single message instead of sending several short ones.
5) Enable Telegram and redirect traffic to that channel: Telegram does not charge per message, making it an excellent option for notifications and recurring customer support.
6) Strengthen phone support for complex cases: Longer conversations tend to generate the highest number of billable messages.
📧 If you’d like to learn more about Suricata AI, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Diego Cúneo is Director of the PR & Communications Lab at Meerkat Cx. A journalist and communicator with over 30 years of experience in leading mass media. He specializes in Corporate Communications, Public Relations and Institutional Affairs, with extensive work across major companies.