From October 1, your AI agent's greeting has a price. So does "let me make sure I understand

From October 1, replies inside the 24-hour window stop being free every turn gets billed. The greeting is billable. "Let me make sure I understand" is billable. The clarifying question, the friendly confirmation at the end, all billable. An agent that takes nine turns to resolve something now costs three times one that takes three. Two things that make this worse than it looks there are no volume tiers on service messages, unlike utility templates. So a large operation doesn't get a better rate, it just pays the same rate far more often, and the gap widens as you scale. And Meta isn't publishing the per-country rates until September 1, so anyone giving you a number right now is guessing. One exception worth knowing: if the conversation starts from a Click-to-WhatsApp ad and you reply within 24 hours, that opens a 72-hour free window where everything you send is free, templates included. That part isn't changing. If you run paid acquisition into WhatsApp, structuring the follow-up to land inside those 72 hours is suddenly worth real money. Nobody had a reason to optimise messages per resolved case, because until now those messages were free. From October it's the number that moves the bill. Rough guess, how many messages does it take your setup to close one case?