What WhatsApp costs an iMessage agent

Twilio is the most-used route to WhatsApp and prices it as a per-message channel fee: $0.005 whether the message is going out or coming in, on top of Meta's own template rates, which it passes through and publishes separately.

The inbound charge is the detail worth noticing. Most comparisons quote the number as if it applied to outbound only, but a back-and-forth exchange incurs it in both directions, which roughly doubles the effective rate for a conversational agent as opposed to a notification sender.

No monthly platform fee is published, which makes it the cheapest option at very low volume and the most expensive at high volume among the providers here. Its Messaging Engagement Suite, covering link shortening, click tracking and scheduling, is a separate $0.015 per message with the first thousand free each month.

Telnyx passes Meta's messaging fee through unchanged and says so prominently: "Meta's rate. $0 markup." That claim is accurate about Meta's rate and incomplete about your bill.

On the same page it publishes a platform usage charge of $0.004 per message. So the amount Telnyx adds is $0.004, which is real money and is lower than Twilio's $0.005, but it is not zero and the headline invites you to think it is. The distinction between "no markup on the underlying rate" and "no charge from us" is the sort of thing worth reading carefully anywhere in this market.

Its framing elsewhere is genuinely clearer than most: "two lines, our rate and the carrier's passthrough, both published, neither marked up." Committed plans with volume discounts start from $500 a month.

360dialog is a Meta-tier provider and prices the opposite way to everyone else here: a flat monthly fee per WhatsApp number, with Meta's messaging fees billed separately and nothing added on top.

The published tiers are €49 per number per month for regular, €99 for premium and €249 for advanced, with a separate partner platform arrangement running from €250 to €1,000 a month plus per-channel add-ons.

The shape matters more than the number. Because it charges nothing per message, its cost stops rising the moment you are past the monthly fee, while every per-message provider keeps climbing. At a few hundred messages a month it is the most expensive option on this page. Somewhere in the low tens of thousands it becomes the cheapest, and the gap widens from there.

respond.io is included here because it appears in every WhatsApp provider comparison, and because for most people reading this site it is the wrong tool.

Its pricing is $79 a month for Starter with five users, $159 for Growth with ten, and $279 for Advanced with ten, with additional users from $12 to $24 each. Meta's fees are billed by Meta directly and respond.io adds no per-message charge.

The seat pricing is the tell. This is a shared inbox for a support team, with automation attached, rather than infrastructure for an autonomous agent. If your product is a piece of software having conversations, you are paying for human seats you do not have. If your product is a support team with an agent helping them, it is a reasonable fit and the per-message economics are among the cleanest here.