ICTworks

Starting October 1 2026, anyone using WhatsApp as a platform to reach their target audience will be charged by Meta for outbound messages.

Until that date, it will have been free to do so within a 24-hour window opened by the user’s last message, meaning that as long as your chatbot (or human agent) was engaging and helpful enough, users seeking support for health, livelihoods, education and psycho-social support could chat for as long as they wanted to (and could afford to themselves).

All implementers had to pay for was the cost of the WhatsApp Business Service Provider (BSP) platform, such as Turn.io, as well as any re-engagement messages to wake up ‘dormant’ users. In the near future, any message sent in response to users will be charged at the same rate as ‘utility templates’, whose costs vary region by region.

This change has huge scale, sustainability, user experience and impact implications for many social impact organisations using, or thinking about using, WhatsApp to reach people across the Global South.

WhatsApp was the channel of choice

WhatsApp became the digital intervention channel of choice starting in 2018, when its API was released, allowing many of us to seize the opportunity to reach our target audience on the channels they actually use.

I was one of very few people designing chatbots back then, experimenting with chatbot copy-writing, design conventions, and figuring out the best way to leverage a fairly restrictive format into a rich experience.

Sure, the ‘chatbots’ we created were pretty basic, relying mostly on text, pre-determined decision-trees, and of course, emojis. But they allowed even small NGOs to reach high volumes of users with potentially life-changing information, advice, and support, on an app that was often zero-rated by MNOs, much less prone to connectivity issues than mobile web, and so embedded in users’ lives that it was less likely to be deleted from their phones to preserve memory or battery power.

Crucially, users trusted WhatsApp chatbots, loving the human-not-human chat-based format.

The pandemic turbo-charged the use of WhatsApp by development and humanitarian practitioners, including multilaterals like WHO who deployed chatbots on WhatsApp and other messaging apps to millions of users in over 19 languages, with the help of Turn.io and organisations like Reach Digital Health.

At a smaller scale, civil society organisations like the International Fact Checking Network, created a chatbot allowing users to submit health misinformation and get it fact checked in minutes. Today, WhatsApp usage represents 69% of all internet usage worldwide, and 83% of monthly users open it every day.

WhatsApp chatbots now feel like old news in the development space ( although we’re still trying to figure out how to measure their impact.)

GenAI chatbots talk more; Meta wants them to talk less

Whilst launching a chatbot for social impact no longer feels like a novelty, WhatsApp chatbot fever is in no-way diminished. GenAI means that we can finally create *actually* smart chatbots, either run entirely using a Large Language Model, or which include genA-powered components to handle specific conversations requiring more personalisation and flexibility.

What this means is that at the exact moment that we are being put under pressure to use genAI to make chatbot experiences richer, more personalised, more flexible, and more accurate, Meta’s new pricing model is forcing us to do the opposite.

Turn’s advice to customers using their platform is to ‘reduce the amount of back-and-forth and get users to what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.’

They position this as a user experience improvement as well as a cost-reduction method, and in a general sense, they’re not wrong – many chatbots could do better at being succinct and reducing their feature bloat.

But it’s also at odds with the parallel push towards AI-powered, conversational experiences – whose underlying agents will now have to be prompted to be ‘less chatty’, when a big reason for their integration was exactly this.

What this will cost implementers

Those with existing WhatsApp services are scrambling to calculate the implications. Informal estimates circulating among implementers range from $500 extra per month, to $4,500 per month to engage with around 10,000 users a month.

As one implementer shared: “this is a major constraint to scaling plans and sustainability projections.” For smaller NGOs, what was a cost-effective way of reaching high-volumes of individuals in their target audience with valuable messaging and support, will become prohibitively expensive.

On the other hand, because exact costs vary per country, some implementers are less concerned. Similarly, for chatbots where the service offering is less dense, and less conversational, the impact may be less significant.

As one implementer shared: “I am personally unconcerned. This is because in India, our charges are going from 2 US cents to 7 US cents. Our per-participant cost overall will remain nothing for us.” (their emphases).

Additionally, where users come from in the first place matters. Anyone who relies on Meta ads which click-to-WhatsApp for the majority of their marketing will still be able to message users for free within a 72 hour window of the first conversation started.

Given that average user lifetime is often only a day, those relying on Meta ads may not be affected at all: basically, don’t panic until you’ve done the maths for your particular set-up.

The human cost

Perhaps more seriously, this pricing change may also impact on the role of humans in increasingly automated services. WhatsApp is also used to support human-staffed Helpdesks, with trained operators able to jump in and out of an automated conversation to provide human-led support, including last-mile service provision referrals.

These agents are central to safeguarding processes, with users expressing suicidal ideation, survivors of Gender Based Violence, or women going through miscarriages referred as soon as possible to human support. Let’s imagine for a second how it would feel to tentatively disclose spousal abuse, or the loss of a baby, when our interlocutor wants to wrap up the conversation as quickly as possible for cost reasons.

How we can push back

As we speak, implementers leveraging WhatsApp, and the integration platforms who allow them to do so, are discussing ways to fight back, for example by:

• Demanding clarity and seeking exemptions for non-profits from Meta;
• Forming a coalition;
• Engaging with country-level regulators;
• Convincing donors to supplement budgets to cover the unexpected surplus.

Whether or not they prevail remains to be seen – the social sector has sought for years with limited success to get Meta to make changes that would enable us to use WhatsApp more effectively in the contexts in which we work.

Our collective bargaining power also ebbs away with every cut to international aid. In the meantime, here are some things you can do, right now.

This isn’t the end for WhatsApp chatbots, but it’s yet another lesson about relying on corporate behemoths to run essential services. Something to think about before you make GPT, Llama, Gemini or Claude central to your entire intervention – but you know that already.

Given their substantial profitability challenges to date, I would bet that the same thing will happen with genAI before too long.

By Isabelle Amazon-Brown who designs chatbots & AI for positive social impact