Facebook’s Whatsapp is about to start charging its business users | City A.M.

In a bid to jumpstart revenue on the messaging service, Facebook has announced it will start charging businesses for sending marketing and customer service messages on Whatsapp.

Messages will be charged at a premium to SMS rates, with a fixed rate for confirmed delivery from 0.5 cents to 9 cents (7p) per message, depending on the country.

Facebook has been exploring ways to monetise Whatsapp for a while, in the face of rising costs as user numbers decrease.

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Whatsapp now has around 1.5bn users. The company said that from today, business can use its Whatsapp Business API to send notifications to users for topics such as delivery confirmations, appointment reminders and event tickets.

In comparison, most service carriers typically charge businesses well below a penny per SMS, and the price is still close to a penny when including fees collected by intermediaries between carriers and businesses.

The Whatsapp Business API will also let businesses respond to messages from users for free for up to 24 hours, but will charge them a fixed rate per message sent after that. The charge for this will also be determined on a country-by-country basis.