What WhatsApp marketing messages cost in India, and why some never arrive

WhatsApp message charges come from Meta, not from the platform you use. On Fliok they are billed by Meta directly to your own WhatsApp Business account; we do not resell messages or add a margin. Here is how those charges work, and why a share of marketing messages is never delivered at all.

How Meta charges

Since 1 July 2025 Meta charges per message rather than per conversation. The price depends on the template’s category and the recipient’s country, and it applies when a message is delivered.

For recipients in India, these are the rates Fliok uses in its spend estimates (Meta’s India card effective 1 July 2026, per message):

A worked example. 1,000 marketing templates delivered to Indian numbers comes to about 1,000 × ₹0.86 ≈ ₹863, before any tax on Meta’s invoice. The same 1,000 order-update templates sent as utility messages to customers who have just written to you would cost nothing, because they land inside the service window.

Why some marketing messages never arrive: error 131049

Meta limits how many marketing messages any one person receives from businesses in a period, so that people are not flooded. When a recipient has reached that limit, Meta accepts your message and later reports it as failed with error 131049, "not delivered to maintain healthy ecosystem engagement".

A few things follow from that:

• It is not a fault in your template or your platform, and you cannot appeal it for a single message.
• It hits marketing messages. On the numbers we run ourselves, most failed marketing sends were 131049, while utility templates sent to the same people rarely failed.
• Because Meta charges on delivery, a message that fails this way is not billed.
• Sending the same person another marketing message soon afterwards usually fails the same way.

What Fliok does about it

• When Meta returns 131049 for a contact, Fliok marks that contact as capped for 24 hours and skips marketing templates to them in that time. The send is recorded as skipped, not failed, so it does not distort your failure rate.
• A 48-hour guard stops two marketing templates reaching the same person within 48 hours.
• Utility and authentication templates and free-form replies are never held back by either guard.
• The analytics page groups failures by the reason Meta returned, so a 131049 problem looks different from a bad number or a template error.

A separate limit: how many people you can message first

Meta also caps how many different people you can start conversations with in a rolling 24 hours. New accounts start at 250. Meta raises the limit in steps once your business is verified, your display name is approved and your quality rating stays healthy; a number whose display name has not been approved can stay at 250. Replies to people who messaged you first do not count against this limit. Fliok shows your number’s current limit and quality rating in Settings, and notifies you if either drops.

How to get more of your marketing delivered

1. 1Send fewer, better marketing messages. Frequency is what the cap punishes.
2. 2Use the utility category for genuinely transactional messages, such as order updates and booking confirmations. Meta reviews categories and can reclassify a template, so do not disguise promotions as utility.
3. 3Ask for opt-in and honour opt-outs. Fliok enforces opt-outs before every business-initiated send.
4. 4Watch the failure breakdown after each campaign rather than the headline delivery rate.

For what the platform itself costs, see pricing.