Meta announced on Wednesday that it will charge developers to run chatbots on WhatsApp in regions where regulators are forcing the company to allow them. The move comes after the company’s ban on third-party chatbots on WhatsApp went into effect on January 15.
For now, Meta will charge developers in Italy, where the country’s competition watchdog asked the company to suspend its policy last December. The company said the new pricing for non-template responses will begin on February 16. Meta plans to charge $0.0691/€0.0572/£0.0498 per message to developers for AI responses. This could lead to big bills for developers if users exchange thousands of queries with AI chatbots every day.
Earlier this month, Meta sent notices to developers by creating an exception for Italian phone numbers and allowing AI chatbots to serve those customers. At the time, the company did not mention plans to charge developers.
Currently, WhatsApp already charges companies to use its API for various template responses to customers, which include use cases such as marketing, utilities or authentication. This includes messages users receive about payment reminders and shipping updates.
“Where we are legally required to provide AI chatbots through the WhatsApp business API, we introduce pricing for companies that choose to use our platform to provide these services,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. This could also set a precedent for other geographies if Meta should back down and allow developers to run their chatbots.
Meta first announced last October that it would block all third-party AI chatbots from using WhatsApp through the WhatsApp Business API.
Meta said its systems were not designed to handle responses from AI bots and were strained.
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“The introduction of AI chatbots to our Business API has placed burdens on our systems that were not designed to support them. This logic assumes that WhatsApp is somehow a de facto app store. The path to market for AI companies is the app stores themselves, their websites and industry partnerships, not the WhatsApp Business platform,” the company said at the time.
Since then, various jurisdictions, including the EU, Italy and Brazil, have launched anti-competitive investigations. Brazil’s watchdog initially asked Meta to suspend the policy. However, a court in Brazil sided with Meta last week and overturned a preliminary injunction blocking the new policy. As a result, the company asked developers not to provide their AI chatbots to users in Brazil, according to TechCrunch.
Ever since the policy started, developers are forced to send a predefined message to their AI chatbot users on WhatsApp to redirect them to their website or app. Providers such as OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft announced last year that their WhatsApp bots would not work after January 15, urging users to access them on other platforms.
