Field notes

Upcoming, 1 October 2026. Meta platform change: in-window replies stop being free

From 1 October 2026 Meta charges for service messages and for utility messages sent in response to users. Meta’s wording is that any non-template message is charged as of that date.

This is the most consequential pricing change on the platform in a while, because the replies it covers are the bulk of what a support team sends. Anything free today that your agents type inside the 24 hour window is billable from October.

What to do about it now: work out how many in-window messages you send in a month, because that number is currently invisible on your bill and will not be after October. Final rate cards for the newly chargeable categories were due by 1 September 2026.

Since 1 August 2026. Meta platform change: Business Agent messages are billed per token

Meta Business Agent messages are now charged per token, at $2.00 per 1M tokens. They were free before this date.

The shape of that bill is unusual for WhatsApp: it scales with how much the agent says rather than with how many conversations it handles. A verbose agent on a hundred conversations can cost more than a terse one on a thousand.

If you are evaluating Meta’s agent, model it separately from your template spend rather than folding it into one WhatsApp number.

Checked 3 August 2026. Operator advice: the device limits people keep getting wrong

The WhatsApp Business app supports up to four linked devices and one phone at a time. A Meta Verified or Meta One subscription raises that to ten, and adds chat assignment and the ability to see which agent and device sent a message.

The part that catches people: if you cancel the subscription or your benefits change, only your four most recently active devices remain linked. If you had ten agents on devices, six lose access.

Two more that surprise people. An account with more than four linked devices receives calls only on the primary device. And linked devices log out if the phone goes unused for more than fourteen days, with automatic disconnection after thirty days of inactivity.

Checked 3 August 2026. Operator advice: what Coexistence does and does not bring across

Coexistence syncs the most recent six months of chat messages and contacts that have a WhatsApp number. Group chat messages are not included, and anything older than six months stays on the phone.

Media in the synced history arrives without media asset ids; those follow separately and only for media sent within fourteen days of onboarding.

A number in use with both the app and the Cloud API has a fixed throughput of twenty messages per second. That is comfortable for conversations and a genuine ceiling for bulk sending, so plan campaigns around it rather than discovering it mid-send.

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Sources, checked June 2026

Sources

Every external claim above comes from one of these official pages, read on the date shown in its note.

• Meta for Developers: WhatsApp Business Platform pricing
• Meta for Developers: Upcoming pricing updates for non-template messages
• WhatsApp Help Center: About multi-agent
• WhatsApp Help Center: About linked devices on the WhatsApp Business app
• Meta for Developers: Onboard WhatsApp Business app users (Coexistence)

Checked on 2026-08-03