Buyer's guide · Platform fees and message costs
A WhatsApp CRM bill in India has two halves, and comparing tools on the first half alone is why so many businesses are surprised in month two. You pay a platform fee to the provider — ₹1,166 to ₹4,899 a month across the mainstream options — and you separately pay Meta for every template message you send. Meta moved from per-conversation to per-message billing on 1 July 2025, and from 1 January 2026 its India rates are ₹0.8631 per marketing message and about ₹0.115 for utility and authentication. Replies you send inside the 24-hour window after a customer messages you are free, whatever the volume. Anything still describing "per conversation" pricing is a year out of date. Below is what each platform actually charges, and which one suits which kind of business.
Cheapest credible entry — from around ₹1,500/month
AiSensy has become the default recommendation for Indian small businesses starting on WhatsApp, largely on price: plans begin around ₹1,500 a month, or roughly ₹1,350 on annual billing, with a Pro tier near ₹3,200. Native INR billing, GST invoicing and fast API activation remove most of the friction that used to make WhatsApp Business API a project. Broadcast and marketing automation are its strongest features, which suits businesses using WhatsApp primarily to push offers and campaigns rather than to run a support desk. A 14-day Pro trial lets you test before committing.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Small Indian businesses and D2C brands whose main use is broadcast marketing, and anyone testing WhatsApp before committing budget.
Best team inbox for support — Growth ₹2,199/month, six users included
Wati is the most polished shared-inbox product in this group and the one support teams settle into fastest: conversations assign cleanly between agents, canned replies and labels are well implemented, and the learning curve is short enough that non-technical staff are productive in a day. Growth is ₹2,199 a month on annual billing with six users included, Pro ₹4,899 and Business ₹14,799. There is also a ₹999 one-time pay-as-you-go option covering 500 messages over three months, which is a genuinely useful way to trial WhatsApp properly without a subscription.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Support and inside-sales teams of three to fifteen people who live in a shared inbox all day.
No markup on Meta rates, unlimited users — ₹3,499 per quarter
Interakt is billed quarterly rather than monthly, which makes headline comparisons misleading: Starter is ₹3,499 per quarter, or roughly ₹1,166 a month, with Growth at ₹7,699 and Advanced at ₹10,499 per quarter. Two things make it genuinely distinctive. It supports unlimited users rather than charging per seat, so a twenty-person team costs the same as a three-person one. And it is one of the few Indian BSPs that does not add a markup to Meta's message rates, passing them through at cost — which matters enormously once monthly volume passes a few thousand messages. Backed by Jio Haptik, with strong Shopify and WooCommerce integration.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Teams with many users, and any business sending real volume where the message markup outweighs the platform fee. Usually the cheapest option at scale.
Strongest sales pipeline features — Growth ₹2,399/month
Gallabox leans further toward sales than the others, with a proper deal pipeline sitting alongside the WhatsApp inbox rather than a conversation list with tags bolted on. Growth is ₹2,399 a month on annual billing with 20% off, Scale ₹5,599 and Pro ₹13,599. If your WhatsApp conversations are leads that need to be tracked through stages to a close — real estate, education, high-value retail — this is closer to a CRM than the inbox-first tools above, and you may avoid buying a separate CRM entirely.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Sales-led businesses tracking WhatsApp leads through pipeline stages — real estate, education, high-ticket retail.
The right answer when WhatsApp is one channel among several — ₹800/user/month
The tools above are WhatsApp-first products that add light CRM. Zoho CRM is the inverse: a full CRM at ₹800 per user per month on Standard, ₹1,400 on Professional and ₹2,400 on Enterprise, with WhatsApp as one channel alongside email, phone and web forms. If your sales process already spans several channels, running WhatsApp inside the CRM keeps one customer record instead of two systems that disagree. You still need WhatsApp Business API access through a BSP underneath, so this is an addition to that cost rather than a replacement for it.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Businesses selling across several channels who need one CRM of record, and existing Zoho customers.
No API, no platform fee, no per-message charge
Worth stating plainly because a lot of businesses are sold an API they do not yet need: the free WhatsApp Business app supports a catalogue, quick replies, labels and away messages, costs nothing, and sends no per-message charges. Its hard limits are that it runs on one phone with up to about five linked devices, has no shared team inbox, no automation beyond canned replies, and no CRM integration. You outgrow it when more than a couple of people need to answer the same number, or when you want to broadcast to more than a handful of contacts at a time. Until then, paying ₹2,000 a month plus message fees buys you nothing.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Solo operators and businesses under about three people. Move to API when you need multiple agents, real broadcast, or system-triggered messages.
AiSensy if price is the deciding factor, from around ₹1,500 a month. Wati if a support team will live in the inbox all day — Growth is ₹2,199 with six users included. Interakt if you have many users or send real message volume, because it charges no markup on Meta rates and does not bill per seat. And if you are under three people, use the free WhatsApp Business app until you genuinely outgrow it.
Two components. Platform fees run from about ₹1,166 a month (Interakt Starter at ₹3,499 per quarter) to ₹4,899 (Wati Pro), with AiSensy from around ₹1,500 and Gallabox from ₹2,399. Meta message charges are separate: ₹0.8631 per marketing message and about ₹0.115 for utility and authentication, as of 1 January 2026. A business sending 5,000 marketing messages a month should budget roughly ₹4,300 in Meta charges on top of the platform fee, plus 18% GST on both.
Yes, substantially. Meta retired conversation-based billing on 1 July 2025 and now charges per template message sent. Under the old model you paid for a 24-hour conversation window; now you pay for each template you send, while free-form replies inside the 24-hour window a customer opens remain free at any volume. Meta then raised India marketing rates about 10% on 1 January 2026, from ₹0.7846 to ₹0.8631. Any guide still explaining conversation pricing is describing a system that no longer exists.
From 1 January 2026: marketing messages ₹0.8631 each, utility messages about ₹0.115, and authentication messages about ₹0.115. Service messages — your free-form replies within 24 hours of a customer contacting you — are free regardless of volume. Most Indian BSPs add a markup of roughly 10-30% on top of Meta's rates; Interakt is notable for passing them through at cost, which becomes the dominant cost factor at higher volumes.
The free app is enough until one of three things is true: more than about two people need to answer the same number, you need to broadcast to more than a few hundred contacts, or you want your systems to send messages automatically — order confirmations, payment reminders, appointment alerts. Any one of those means API and a BSP. None of them means you should be paying a platform fee today.
Interakt, usually by a clear margin, because the platform fee stops being the main cost once volume rises. At 50,000 marketing messages a month, Meta charges roughly ₹43,000 — so a 20% BSP markup is about ₹8,600 a month, which dwarfs any difference in platform fees. Interakt's zero markup and unlimited users make it the cheapest at scale even though its headline quarterly price looks higher than AiSensy's monthly one.
Yes. Both integrate with WhatsApp through a BSP, so conversations attach to the contact record alongside email and call history. This is the right architecture when WhatsApp is one channel among several and you need a single customer record. It is the wrong architecture if WhatsApp is essentially your entire sales channel — in that case a WhatsApp-first tool will be faster to run and cheaper.
Usually one to three working days now, considerably faster than it once was. You need a Facebook Business Manager account, a phone number not currently active on the WhatsApp consumer or Business app, and business verification documents — GST certificate, incorporation papers or equivalent. Display-name approval is the step that most often causes a rejection: Meta checks the name against your registered business identity, so a nickname or marketing slogan will be refused.
Tell us your monthly message volume and how many agents need the inbox — we will work out which platform is actually cheapest for you, including the Meta charges. WhatsApp +91 98119 98370.