What it costs

There are two separate bills, and confusing them is the most common billing question we get.

ONPAD does not collect Meta's charges, does not add a markup to them, and cannot refund them. Meta bills you directly.

This also means a payment method has to be set up on the Meta side too. An active ONPAD plan does not keep messages flowing if Meta has no way to charge you — Meta will stop delivering.

The ONPAD subscription

Every new account starts on a 7-day free trial, and the trial is one per person, not one per workspace — creating a second workspace does not reset it.

Plans, prices and limits live in the app, because they change: open Plans & billing inside your workspace for the current list. Deliberately, they are not printed here, so this page cannot go stale and quote you a price that no longer exists.

What differs between plans is broadly: how many contacts you can store, how many messages you can send through campaigns and the API, how many team members can sign in, and which features are switched on.

Meta's message charges

Meta charges per message, not per conversation. This replaced the older conversation-based model, where one price covered 24 hours of back-and-forth. Now, one reply costs one message, and five replies cost five.

What you pay for depends on the category:

• Marketing templates — always charged.
• Utility templates — charged when sent outside an open customer service window.
• Authentication templates — charged when sent outside an open customer service window.
• Free-form messages inside an open 24-hour window — not charged as template messages.

There is also a free entry point window: when a customer reaches you through a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or a Facebook Page call button, a 72-hour window opens during which messages to that customer are free.

Rates differ by country and by category, and Meta changes them. Meta's own pricing page is the only accurate source, and it is linked at the bottom of this page. Any rate you see quoted on a third-party blog may already be out of date.

Utility and authentication messages get cheaper at higher monthly volumes, through tiers Meta aggregates across all the business accounts in your portfolio.

If you are in India

Meta localised billing for India on 1 January 2026. Eligible businesses must migrate their WhatsApp Business Account to INR billing by 31 December 2026. Accounts that have not migrated can see message delivery disrupted from 1 January 2027.

Check this in Meta Business Manager, under your WhatsApp Business Account's billing settings. ONPAD cannot do the migration for you and does not get told whether you have done it.

How to keep costs down

Reply inside the 24-hour window. A free-form reply to a customer who just messaged you costs nothing as a template. The same information sent tomorrow needs a template, which is charged.

Do not send marketing when utility would do. An order update genuinely is a utility message, and utility rates are lower. But write it as a utility message — if it carries an offer, Meta will re-categorise it as marketing anyway.

Keep your lists clean. Every message to a wrong or dead number is still a delivery attempt. Import problems and bad data cost money as well as quality rating.

Watch your quality rating. It is free to keep it green and expensive to lose it — a red rating can pause your number, and a paused number sends nothing at any price.

Where to check the real numbers

• ONPAD plans — Plans & billing inside your workspace
• Meta's rates — Pricing on the WhatsApp Business Platform
• Your Meta bill — Meta Business Manager, under your WhatsApp Business Account

Meta's pricing rules have changed more than once, most recently in 2025 and 2026. If what you read here and what Meta's page says ever disagree, Meta's page is right — tell us and we will fix this page.