WhatsApp Business Plans to Reduce Marketing Spam by Changing its Message Rates

A conversation is a 24-hour thread between sellers and users on WhatsApp Business, which has changed its per-conversation charges for businesses. The business is increasing the cost of marketing messages while decreasing the cost of utility messages.

Businesses are billed by Meta via four types of messages: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords), and service (customer inquiries).

The new marketing conversation prices will go into effect on October 4 of this year, while the new utility rates will take effect on August 4. Since WhatsApp began charging by category rather than a flat fee for all conversations, this is the first update on discussion prices.

The company levies different fees to retailers in different countries. The rates for marketing and utility conversation rates are changing in India, for example, from $0.0099 to $0.0107 (+8%) and $0.0042 to $0.0014 (-67%), respectively.

This will probably influence companies to choose WhatsApp as their main method of consumer communication.

Users have been complaining for the past year about an increase in WhatsApp messages, which they say is causing spam. The company has gradually installed barriers to protect customers from this spam.

The company began testing “Per-User Marketing Template Message Limits” guidelines earlier this year to impose limitations on marketing communications sent to users in India. Brand communications are not subject to a strict limit set by Meta; nonetheless, messages deemed “less likely to be read” are blocked.

Meta announced following the test phase that it had globalized these guidelines last month.

“People turn to WhatsApp to do everything from asking questions about a product, receiving a boarding pass, or getting an offer for a holiday sale. There can be too much of a good thing, so we’re working to find the right combination of tools to get this right so people continue having a great experience messaging businesses on WhatsApp,” a Meta spokesperson told in a statement.

These days, WhatsApp Business makes a significant financial contribution to Meta. There are more than 200 million WhatsApp Business users, the company reported last year.