Meta Business Agent, separated into what is known and what is not

Known: what Meta states

It is configured through the Meta Business Agent Platform APIs, where you define what the agent knows, how it responds, and what actions it can take, including its tone and brand voice.

It can draw on business information and FAQs, website content and files, connected APIs for taking actions such as order lookups or appointment bookings, and webhook subscriptions to listen for events.

To use it you need a WhatsApp Business Account with a business phone number, a Meta app with the `whatsapp_business_messaging` permission, and to be operating in a supported country and vertical.

Availability is restricted. Meta states it operates only in approved regions, lists 182 supported countries, and names eligible verticals including automotive, retail and e-commerce, professional services, CPG and travel.

On cost, Meta states that Business Agent messages follow distinct pricing separate from standard WhatsApp message rates, and that from 1 August 2026 they are charged per token at $2.00 per 1M tokens. Before that date they were free.

Not specified by Meta, at least not in the overview we read

These are things the overview does not answer as of the checked date. That is a statement about the documentation, not a claim that any of them is impossible.

• ▲Whether and how it coexists with a third-party team inbox on the same business number.
• ▲How a conversation is handed from the agent to a human, and what the human sees when it arrives.
• ▲How it interacts with automation you already run on the number.
• ▲What token volume a typical conversation consumes, which is what would turn the per-token rate into a monthly figure you could plan around.
• ▲When, or whether, the eligible vertical and region lists expand.
• ▲If one of them decides your architecture, ask Meta before you build on it.

How it relates to marv.Inbox

They overlap. Meta Business Agent is an AI responder that Meta runs on your number; marv.Inbox is a team inbox with its own automation and AI assistance that you run on your number. Both want to be involved when a message arrives.

We have not integrated with Meta Business Agent, and we are not going to claim compatibility we have not built and tested. If you are evaluating both, treat that as an open question to resolve before you commit, not a detail to sort out later.

What we can say usefully is the cost shape. An AI responder that is billed per token has a bill that scales with conversation length rather than with conversation count, which is a different curve from the per-delivered-template model the rest of WhatsApp uses. Model it separately.

The wider context matters too: from 1 October 2026 ordinary non-template messages become chargeable as well, so the gap between "let AI answer" and "let a person answer" narrows on cost and comes down to which one answers better.

Questions

Sources, checked June 2026

Sources

Every statement in the Known section is from these pages, read on the checked date. Meta changes this documentation without notice, and this is a fast-moving feature.

• Meta for Developers: Meta Business Agent Platform overview
• Meta for Developers: Upcoming pricing updates for non-template messages
• Meta for Developers: WhatsApp Business Platform pricing

Checked on 2026-08-03