You've searched "WhatsApp Business API pricing" and the first page you land on talks about per-conversation billing, rates that change by country, and categories with names that say nothing on their own: *marketing*, *utility*, *authentication*. You multiply by however many messages you think you'll get in a month and the number is scary enough that you close the tab and put it off.
That number is miscalculated — not because per-conversation pricing doesn't exist, it does, but because it's being applied to the wrong thing. Not to what an assistant that only replies to people who write to you actually does.
Meta charges for templates: messages the business starts without the customer having written first. A reminder you send at 8am, a promotion, a notice that an order has shipped that nobody asked about. That does cost something, and it depends on the country and the message category.
What it doesn't charge — since November 2024 — is messages your customers send you, or the service conversations you open to reply to them. In other words: someone messages you asking your hours, you (or your assistant) reply within that conversation, and that part is free. The distinction isn't subtle or buried in fine print: it's the difference between a business that writes first and a business that replies.
The ChatME assistant connected to your WhatsApp Business number does exactly the second thing. It replies to whoever messages you, within WhatsApp's service window, using the same knowledge base it already uses on your web chatbot: hours, prices, availability. It never writes first, and it never sends promotions or reminders on its own. No templates involved, so none of that advertised cost applies.
One thing: your ChatME plan. The WhatsApp Business channel is included, at no extra cost, on the Pro (€79/month) and E-commerce (€99/month) plans — see all plans. There's no per-conversation charge, no credit packs, no separate Meta invoice landing at month-end for having replied to messages. You connect your number yourself from the dashboard, in a few minutes, following the connection guide.
The WhatsApp Business app itself is free, and messages you write by hand from it — outside the assistant — stay free too, as they always have.
If you ever decide to send a reminder or a promotion the customer didn't ask for, that would be a template and it would cost something, per Meta's rate for your country. But that's a decision you make yourself, explicitly — not something the assistant does on your behalf: by default it never sends anything unsolicited, so if you never turn that kind of message on, that cost simply doesn't exist for you.
It's worth saying this plainly because it's exactly where people who've read about the WhatsApp API get confused: it isn't that templates are cheap and everything else is free; it's that replying to a customer isn't a template at all, and an assistant that only replies never generates that cost in the first place.
Meta's documentation is written for developers building their own integration, and there the unit of measure is billable conversations, with their categories and per-country rates. That's accurate information, but it describes a different world — someone building their own integration and deciding when to start conversations — from the one a small business lives in when it just wants to reply faster to people already messaging it. A lot of pages explaining this don't make that distinction and leave the impression that every WhatsApp Business message carries a per-unit price. That isn't true for the most common case: replying.
Your assistant doesn't replace a person on a live phone call, and it doesn't hand the conversation to a human in real time inside the chat. When something falls outside what it knows how to answer, it says so, points the customer to your contact details, and the conversation stays logged in your dashboard, under Conversations, for you to pick up. If you also want the customer's details by email, set up a contact form in your dashboard with the keywords your customers tend to use: when they come up in the chat, the assistant asks for those details and they reach you by email — without the conversation, which stays in the dashboard. And there's a maintenance condition that has nothing to do with ChatME and everything to do with WhatsApp: if the phone holding your number goes about two weeks without being opened, WhatsApp cuts the connection.
If you want the full picture of how the connection works — including the option to keep your number on your own phone without moving it anywhere — the guide is in the Help Center. And if customers also message you on Instagram, the same assistant answers there too, included on the same plans, at no extra cost and nothing to configure separately.
If you have a billing question specific to your case, email us at info@chatme.es.
*Availability may vary by country.*
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