GREEN-API webinar summary. New game, new rules

What the Webinar Was About

Online webinars with partners and clients have already become a cherished tradition at GREEN-API, as these meetings are where we share updates on WhatsApp, announce new features from our service, and discuss market news.

On October 8, we held another meeting on Zoom to take an in-depth look at Meta’s** new pricing plans for businesses, updates to the WhatsApp Business ecosystem, and to announce new products from GREEN-API.

Service Messages: What’s New

The webinar began with the most important topic—Meta’s new pricing plans for certain types of messages. Specifically, the cost of service messages has changed. Previously, in a standard conversation scenario (after the customer initiated the conversation), companies could reply with several messages for free. These messages were unrestricted: they didn’t need to be approved by Meta and were sent within a 24-hour window after the customer’s reply—meaning communication proceeded just like a regular WhatsApp conversation.

Following changes to Meta’s pricing policy, which took effect on October 1, the company has made ALL messages sent by businesses to customers subject to a fee. Our advice: provide as much information as possible in a single message when responding to customer questions and pay once instead of multiple times (unless, of course, this makes the message harder to understand).

To summarize, we recommend that partners review their current guidelines and customer interaction workflows to reduce the cost of service messages.

Service messages on the WhatsApp Business API are subject to character limits. The maximum length of a text message is 4,096 characters, which is approximately 600–800 words. This limit includes letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc.

Please note that under the new rules, the first 1,000 service messages are free—your company can send them in response to customers. Once this threshold is reached, Meta will begin charging for them. We recommend reviewing analytics from previous months to get an idea of how much you’ll likely have to pay.

Our recommendations are listed in the table below:

Transactional Messages: All Templates Are Paid

Next, we discussed the new pricing for transactional messages—confirmations sent in response to a customer’s action, such as when purchasing a particular type of service, like booking an online tour or reserving a hotel room. Transactional messages are triggered by buttons such as “Get Receipt,” “Go to My Account,” etc.

Previously, transactional messages sent to users in response to their actions were free. Following a major update to Meta’s pricing policy effective October 1, they are now billed separately regardless of the template, even if sent within the 24-hour service window.

Transactional messages are subject to separate text and character length limits—1,024 characters in the main body of the reply, not including action buttons.

Meta Business Agent

As we’ve previously mentioned, Meta Business Agent is Meta’s official AI agent that can respond to customers in chats and process their requests within the 24-hour service window. Its cost is based on tokens, and the number of tokens required depends on the complexity of the responses.

Free Entry Point Window (FEP)

The Free Entry Point Window opens when a WhatsApp user enters a chat with a company via a “Click to WhatsApp” ad, a call-to-action button on Facebook, or a post on Instagram.

After clicking the link, a standard 24-hour window opens, during which companies’ responses to users are free of charge.

How It Works in Practice

Let’s say a customer clicked a link on Instagram and entered a chat with a seller. A manager joined the conversation and sent service messages. The conversation continues, and the customer takes some time to think it over. The next day, you can send a promotional template to remind them of your business and suggest other products you offer. The dialogue then continues based on the promotional template, and you don’t have to pay extra for any of these messages.

Read our article to learn how the FEP window works.

WAME Multi-Providers

We’ve written separately about the revolution in the Meta ecosystem. Whereas previously each business service provider (BSP) had to register multiple numbers, now a single number is sufficient for all of them, with each having its own billing and payment system.

GREEN-API News

Thanks to changes in Meta, advertising messages for our clients have become cheaper: whereas they previously cost 39 tenge for Kazakhstan and 12 rubles for Russia, they now cost 36 tenge and 9 rubles, respectively.
We’re also excited to share the good news that we’ve eliminated the subscription fee—now, when using the GREEN-API service, billing will be based solely on the number of messages actually sent via Meta.
Current prices for Kazakhstan and Russia are listed in the table below:

You can find more information about the price calculator on our website.

GREEN-API Updates

Toward the end of the webinar, we made several important announcements from our team—the call feature in the API gateway, which is currently in beta testing on instances, will be available soon. This new feature could replace companies’ existing phone systems, and there are no additional charges expected for making calls.

This new feature supports multiple simultaneous calls on a single account; in other words, if you have several sales managers, they’ll be able to both receive and make calls from a single number.

Another new feature from GREEN-API will be integration with Instagram, allowing users to create posts and Stories and comment on them. We’ll provide a separate update as soon as these new features become available. Stay tuned for updates.

WhatsApp Coexistence by GREEN-API

This is a combined mode of operation between the official API and the standard WhatsApp app on a smartphone. WhatsApp Coexistence allows you to simultaneously take advantage of all the features of WhatsApp Business on your device and the functionality of WABA, such as sending interactive messages or informational notifications.

With WhatsApp Coexistence, you can reduce the cost of communicating with leads and implement two interaction scenarios:

• Companies can send promotional messages via WABA and respond to those messages through the standard WhatsApp app

or

• Initiate and conduct conversations with customers (just like with standard WhatsApp) and send transactional messages and notifications to the chat from the same number

How It Works

For example, let’s say we’re having a conversation with a customer. They receive a notification about their order, which they can track by clicking the button in the interactive message. Messages sent from the device (without using WABA for service notifications) do not count toward the service message quota.

This feature will be available soon. Stay tuned for updates on our social media channels and website.

Conclusion

We’ve tried to cover the latest news from the world of WhatsApp and discuss changes in the Meta ecosystem. Based on feedback from partners and customers, the webinar was informative, and we set aside separate time for questions and answers—of which there were quite a few—as the topic proved to be both relevant and interesting.

Here at GREEN-API, we keep track of all WhatsApp updates to provide you with the latest news and solutions for automating your business processes. Stay tuned to stay up to date on all the latest developments!