WhatsApp API Pricing in India

This page is the rupee version: what a message costs, what GST adds, what your provider adds on top, and what a real wedding works out to. If you want the mechanics of how Meta’s pricing model works rather than the numbers, that is in how WhatsApp pricing works.

The India rate card

One thing to be clear about: rates follow the recipient, not you. Being an Indian business does not make your messages cost Indian rates - it makes the messages you send to Indian numbers cost Indian rates. A guest list with relatives in the UK or the Gulf is priced on those cards, which for a diaspora wedding can be a meaningful share of the bill.

The 7.5× decision

Look at those two numbers again. Marketing ₹0.8631. Utility ₹0.1150. The same message, worded slightly differently, can land in either bucket.

In absolute terms both are trivial against a wedding budget. The reason it matters is that the multiplier is structural and it scales: a planner running forty weddings a season is choosing between roughly ₹2,700 and ₹20,000 on invitations alone - and invitations are one message type out of a dozen a wedding sends.

And you do not fully control which side you land on. Meta’s classifier decides at submission, and in our experience a single exclamation mark is enough to flip a template. That is why how a template is worded is a pricing decision wearing a copywriting costume.

What gets added on top

GST at 18%, on the whole invoice. Most published comparisons omit this, which understates a real bill by nearly a fifth.

Your provider. Almost nobody sends through Meta directly - you use software, and that software charges, either a monthly fee, a per-message markup, or a per-wedding price. This is the part that varies most, and the part worth asking about directly. Three useful questions: do you mark up Meta’s rate or charge a platform fee, do failed messages appear on my invoice, and how will you handle the 1 October 2026 service-message charge.

Two dates worth having in your calendar

1 October 2026 - replies inside the 24-hour window get a monthly ceiling. Each business phone number gets 1,000 free service messages a month, with no roll-over; past that they bill at the utility rate, which in India is ₹0.1150 before GST. In-window utility templates stop being free on the same date. If you run a concierge or answer guest questions at volume, that moves from a zero-cost activity to a metered one.

31 December 2026 - India-billed accounts must be migrated to INR billing. From 1 January 2027 Meta stops delivering messages from non-INR accounts of eligible customers, which lands squarely in wedding season. Detail in the INR billing deadline.

To model your own numbers rather than ours, the pricing calculator handles GST, provider markup and the October change in one place.