Kenyan businesses face rising costs for communicating with customers on WhatsApp, after Meta announced it will begin charging for messages sent in response to client queries from October 1, ending years of free services on the platform.
Under the new pricing, WhatsApp will charge Kenyan businesses $0.0040, roughly Sh0.52, for every delivered message sent to a customer, part of a wider push by the American technology giant to monetise features on its Business platform that have long been offered free of charge. Meta confirmed the shift in an announcement covering the change.
“From October 1, 2026, Meta will charge for utility messages sent in response to users within an open 24-hour customer service window. These messages have not been charged for since July 1, 2025.” The company said the 24-hour window used to determine chargeable messages is calculated from the moment a customer first sends a message.
The new charge applies specifically to what Meta terms service and utility messages, with service messages being replies a business sends to a customer’s query, and utility messages covering updates such as order status or payment confirmation.
Both categories have been free since WhatsApp Business first launched in 2018, and can be sent either by a human customer service representative or by a third-party AI tool. Importantly, only messages that are actually delivered to a recipient will attract a charge, and customers themselves will not be billed for reaching out to businesses.
Kenya’s rate sits toward the lower end of the region; businesses in Nigeria will pay Sh0.87 per message, South Africa Sh0.98, and Egypt Sh0.47, while Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda will be charged the same rate as Kenya.
WhatsApp Business, a standalone version of the standard app built for small business owners, also offers features such as product catalogues, automated replies and broadcast messaging, alongside separate paid API services that let larger enterprises send messages at scale and integrate WhatsApp with their customer relationship management systems.
This is not the first category of WhatsApp messaging Meta has moved to charge for. Promotional or marketing messages have already carried a fee for some time, priced at $0.0225, about Sh3, in Kenya, compared with Sh7 in Nigeria, Sh5 in South Africa and Sh8 in Egypt.
That traces back to July 2025, when Meta first moved business-initiated template messages, covering marketing, utility and authentication communications, onto a per-message pricing model, replacing an older system based on 24-hour conversation windows. The October change extends that same logic to service messages, which had remained one of the last major categories still offered free.
Meta has also begun charging separately for interactions handled by Meta Business Agent, an AI assistant it introduced in June, built directly into platforms including Messenger and Instagram, which is capable of answering customer questions, recommending products, negotiating prices, booking appointments and escalating conversations to human staff when required.
Business Agent messages, which began attracting charges from August 1, 2026, are billed through a token-based system rather than a flat per-message rate, at a global rate of $2, about Sh259 per one million tokens. A typical message consumes between 20,000 and 25,000 tokens, working out to roughly five US cents, about Sh6, though costs rise with complexity.
A simple query such as asking about a Nairobi CBD branch’s opening hours might use around 80,000 tokens across a four-message exchange, costing about $0.16 (Sh21), while a more involved interaction, such as guiding a customer through selecting and purchasing an item from an online catalogue, could run to roughly ten messages and 250,000 tokens, costing up to $0.50 (Sh65).
The change is expected to be felt most acutely by Kenya’s smaller enterprises, thousands of which rely on WhatsApp Business as their primary and often only channel for communicating with customers, frequently leaning on automated replies to handle routine queries such as opening hours or to share links to their product catalogues.
Meta has warned that businesses need to act before the deadline to avoid disruption. “Any businesses that do not have a payment method on file by September 30 will have their service messages stopped on October 1,” the company said.
