Meta announced Wednesday that it will charge developers who run chatbots on WhatsApp in regions where regulators are forcing the company to allow it. The move comes after the company banned third-party chatbots on WhatsApp, effective January 15.
For now, Meta plans to charge developers in Italy, where the country’s competition watchdog asked the company to suspend the policy in December. The company said new pricing for non-template responses will begin on February 16th. Meta plans to charge developers $0.0691/€0.0572/£0.0498 per message for AI responses. If users are exchanging thousands of queries with an AI chatbot every day, it can lead to high bills for developers.
Earlier this month, Meta sent a notice to developers that it would create an exemption for Italian phone numbers, allowing AI chatbots to serve those customers. At the time, the company did not mention any plans to charge developers.
Currently, WhatsApp already charges businesses to use its API for various templated responses to customers, including use cases such as marketing, utilities, and authentication. This includes messages users receive for payment reminders and shipping updates.
“If we are legally required to offer AI chatbots through the WhatsApp Business API, we will introduce pricing for businesses that choose to use our platform to provide those services,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. This could set a precedent in other regions if the meta caves in and requires developers to work with chatbots.
Meta first announced in October this year 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 being taxed.
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“The emergence of AI chatbots in our business APIs has put a strain on our systems that they were not designed to support. This logic assumes that WhatsApp is somehow a de facto app store. The route to market for AI companies is the app store itself, its website, and industry partnerships, not the WhatsApp Business Platform,” the company said at the time.
Since then, various regions have launched anticompetitive investigations, including the EU, Italy, and Brazil. Brazil’s watchdog agency initially called on Meta to suspend the policy. But a Brazilian court last week sided with Meta and canceled an interim order blocking the new policy. As a result, the company asked developers not to offer their AI chatbots to users in Brazil, TechCrunch learned.
Since the policy was triggered, developers must send a predefined message to users of their AI chatbots on WhatsApp to redirect them to their site or app. Providers including OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft announced last year that their WhatsApp bots would stop working after January 15, urging users to access them on other platforms.
