Gupshup WhatsApp API Pricing 2026: ₹0.09/Msg + Hidden Fees
Founder & Lead Developer, Codingclave · 200+ projects since 2017
Gupshup WhatsApp API pricing is a flat $0.001 per message, about ₹0.09 at ₹88 to the dollar, charged on top of Meta's India rates of ₹0.8631 per marketing message and ₹0.115 per utility or authentication message. That makes a marketing message about ₹0.95 before GST and ₹1.12 after it. There is no monthly fee or setup fee on the self-serve tier. I checked these figures on gupshup.ai/pricing on 4 October 2026 (gupshup.io/pricing redirects there).
That is the whole official price list. Everything else people search for, enterprise plans, volume tiers, AI pricing, is quote-only. This page lays out what the official page says, what your bill actually looks like, and the seven costs that do not appear on it. I'm Ashish Sharma, founder of Codingclave in Lucknow; we ship WhatsApp Business API integrations across India and have read a lot of Gupshup invoices.
Gupshup pricing at a glance (checked 4 October 2026)
| Component | Rate (2026) |
|---|---|
| Gupshup fee per template message (outgoing) | $0.001 (about ₹0.09) |
| Gupshup fee per session message (outgoing and incoming) | $0.001 (about ₹0.09) |
| Gupshup fee on media above 64KB | Free |
| Gupshup voice calls | $0.0001 per second |
| Meta marketing message (India) | ₹0.8631 |
| Meta utility message (India) | ₹0.115 (free inside an open 24-hour service window) |
| Meta authentication message (India) | ₹0.115 |
| Meta service message (user-initiated) | First 1,000 per phone number per month free, then ₹0.115 from 1 October 2026 |
| Self-serve setup or subscription | ₹0 (wallet pre-pay) |
| Enterprise managed plan | Quote-only; minimum commits I have seen start at ₹4,000 to ₹15,000 a month |
| GST | 18 percent on Meta and Gupshup charges |
Worked example: an Indian D2C brand sending 10,000 marketing and 5,000 utility messages a month pays Meta ₹9,206 and Gupshup ₹1,320, so about ₹10,500 before GST and ₹12,400 after. If customers send 3,000 replies, add ₹264 in Gupshup session fees.
Gupshup pricing plans (official) vs what you actually pay
Gupshup's pricing page lists one plan. Here is what it says against what lands on the invoice.
| What the official page says | What you actually pay |
|---|---|
| "A standard 0.001 USD per message fee" | ₹0.088 at ₹88 per dollar, and it rises when the rupee weakens. Priced in dollars, so no two months are identical. |
| "WhatsApp charges message based fee and it is billed at actuals" | Meta's India rates: ₹0.8631 marketing, ₹0.115 utility and authentication. Marketing has no volume discount; utility and authentication tier down with volume. |
| Template and session messages both $0.001 | The fee applies to incoming customer messages too. A support-heavy account pays Gupshup for every reply it receives. |
| No setup fee, no monthly fee | True on self-serve. Enterprise and managed plans have monthly minimum commits that you pay whether or not you use them. |
| Service messages: first 1,000 free | Meta's rule from 1 October 2026. After 1,000 a month per phone number, service messages cost the utility rate (₹0.115). Gupshup's $0.001 applies from the first one. |
| Nothing about tax | 18 percent GST on both the Meta charge and the Gupshup fee. ₹0.95 becomes ₹1.12 per marketing message. |
| Nothing about AI, enterprise, or volume tiers | All quote-only. Enterprise per-message rates do fall below self-serve past roughly 1 lakh messages a month, but you commit to a minimum to get there. |
If you want to compare this against a subscription BSP, the WhatsApp API pricing comparison guide models Gupshup vs WATI line by line: Gupshup's BSP layer at 30,000 messages is about ₹2,640 with no inbox or CRM tooling, against WATI's ₹2,499 to ₹9,999 a month plus per-message markup with both included.
Gupshup WhatsApp API pricing per message in India: the full maths
Gupshup runs a two-layer model:
- Meta WhatsApp fees, charged at Meta's India rate card and deducted from your wallet per message.
- Gupshup platform fee, a flat $0.001 on every template and session message, plus $0.0001 per second on voice calls.
| Message type | Meta (India) | Gupshup fee | Total before GST | Total with 18% GST |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing template | ₹0.8631 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.95 | ₹1.12 |
| Utility template (outside window) | ₹0.115 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.20 | ₹0.24 |
| Authentication template | ₹0.115 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.20 | ₹0.24 |
| Utility template (inside 24-hour window) | ₹0 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.09 | ₹0.10 |
| Service message (within first 1,000 a month) | ₹0 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.09 | ₹0.10 |
| Service message (beyond 1,000, from 1 Oct 2026) | ₹0.115 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.20 | ₹0.24 |
| Incoming customer message | ₹0 | ₹0.088 | ₹0.09 | ₹0.10 |
Notice the ratio. On marketing, Gupshup's fee is about 10 percent of Meta's rate. On utility and authentication, it is 77 percent of Meta's rate, because Meta's India utility price is so low. OTP-heavy and order-update-heavy senders feel Gupshup's fee far more than marketers do.
Billing model change you should know: Meta retired the 24-hour conversation pricing on 1 July 2025 and now bills per message. Gupshup followed. Every outbound template is a line item, not part of a conversation bundle. Authentication and utility have telescopic volume tiers; marketing does not.
Meta's India per-message rates that Gupshup passes through
Effective 1 January 2026, when Meta also moved India billing to rupees (per Meta's developer pricing docs):
| Category | India rate (INR per message) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | ₹0.8631 | Up about 10 percent from ₹0.7846; no volume discount |
| Utility | ₹0.115 | Free inside an open 24-hour service window; volume tiers up to 30 percent off |
| Authentication | ₹0.115 | OTPs, 2FA, login codes; volume tiers |
| Service | ₹0 for the first 1,000 per phone number per month, then ₹0.115 | Charging started 1 October 2026 |
Every BSP passes these through unchanged. Gupshup, WATI, Interakt, AiSensy and PayPerWA all charge the same Meta fees; the difference is the BSP layer and what tooling comes with it.
One deadline to diarise: BSP notices (Monty Mobile's summary is the clearest I have read) say WhatsApp Business Accounts billed in dollars must migrate to INR billing by 31 December 2026, and a dollar WABA cannot be switched in place; a new rupee-billed WABA has to be created. If your Gupshup account is old, ask your account manager now.
Gupshup hidden fees: seven costs the official page does not show
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Incoming messages are billed. The $0.001 session fee applies to messages your customers send you. Support-heavy accounts pay for every reply.
-
Dollar pricing. The fee is $0.001, so your rupee cost moves with the exchange rate. Budget in dollars if you want a predictable number.
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GST on both layers. 18 percent on Meta's charge and on Gupshup's fee. Most people quote the pre-GST ₹0.95 and get a ₹1.12 invoice.
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Wallet pre-pay. You fund upfront; unused balance sits idle. Match top-ups to actual volume.
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Service messages from 1 October 2026. Beyond 1,000 a month per phone number, Meta charges the utility rate. Brands that moved support to WhatsApp because it was free need to re-forecast this month.
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Enterprise minimums. Managed plans carry a monthly commit; miss the volume and you still pay it. Reviews on G2 and SelectHub also flag price changes landing without much notice, so set wallet alerts and read every invoice.
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Voice. $0.0001 per second on WhatsApp calls. Small, but new, and easy to forget in a budget.
Template rejections cost nothing in money, but each one delays a campaign by a day or two. Gupshup's template support is reliable but slower than WATI's in my experience.
Gupshup as a BSP: what the $0.001 buys you
Gupshup is a Meta Business Solution Provider. The BSP hosts your WhatsApp Business API connection, submits templates, delivers webhooks, runs the wallet and passes Meta's charges through. For $0.001 a message you get:
- A stable, high-throughput API that scales to millions of messages (the consistent praise in reviews)
- Template submission and approval tooling
- Webhooks for delivery, read and inbound events
- Carrier relationships across India and APAC, with SMS and RCS on the same account (see my Gupshup SMS pricing breakdown)
- ISO 27001 and SOC 2 posture that regulated buyers ask for
What you do not get at that price: a shared team inbox, CRM, campaign segmentation UI of the kind WATI, Interakt and AiSensy bundle into their subscriptions, or fast support. Gupshup is plumbing. Good plumbing, but you build or buy the taps yourself.
Gupshup AI pricing: Agent Studio and vertical bundles
Gupshup sells AI Agent Studio and vertical AI solutions (BFSI, retail, healthcare) layered on top of the BSP. None of it is public. Every quote I have seen was per-seat or per-conversation, negotiated and folded into an enterprise commit.
For most brands we work with, a chatbot layer we build ourselves on the raw Gupshup BSP is cheaper and gives you control of prompts, data and handoff. Buy Gupshup's bundle when your compliance team wants one accountable vendor for the whole stack and the budget is not the constraint.
Gupshup vs WATI vs Interakt vs AiSensy vs PayPerWA: 30,000 messages a month
Same mix for every provider: 20,000 marketing plus 10,000 utility messages. Meta's charges for that mix are ₹18,412 regardless of BSP.
| Provider | BSP layer (per month) | Estimated total before GST | What the BSP layer includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gupshup (self-serve) | ₹2,640 ($0.001 × 30,000) | about ₹21,050 | API, templates, webhooks; no inbox or CRM |
| Gupshup (enterprise) | Quote-only; commits I have seen from ₹4,000 to ₹15,000 | about ₹22,400 to ₹33,400 | Account manager, SLAs, negotiated per-message rate |
| AiSensy | ₹999 plan plus per-message markup | from about ₹19,400 | Campaign UI, basic inbox |
| Interakt | ₹2,142 to ₹6,963 plus markup | about ₹20,550 to ₹25,400 | Shopify-native flows, inbox |
| WATI | ₹2,499 to ₹9,999 plus markup | about ₹20,900 to ₹28,400 | Team inbox, CRM, automations |
| PayPerWA (ours) | ₹6,000 (₹0.20 × 30,000) | about ₹24,400 | Campaigns, 2-way inbox, chatbot builder, rupee billing, failed messages refunded |
| Direct Meta Cloud API | ₹0 | ₹18,412 plus your engineering cost | Nothing; you build it |
Per-message markups for WATI, Interakt and AiSensy vary by plan; the WhatsApp API pricing comparison guide has the full modelling, including Gupshup vs WATI at 10,000, 30,000 and 1 lakh messages.
Honest reading of the table: at 30,000 messages a month, Gupshup self-serve has the cheapest BSP layer of any subscription-free option, including ours. Gupshup is also the clear winner past 1 lakh messages a month once enterprise rates kick in. Where it loses is everything around the API: UI, support speed, rupee billing and refunds on failed sends.
Disclosure on PayPerWA: it is our own product, built on the Meta Cloud API, ₹0.20 per message platform fee, no subscription, billed in rupees, failed messages refunded to your wallet. It costs more per message than Gupshup. It is the right pick under about 5,000 messages a month with variable volume, where the difference is a few hundred rupees and founder-direct support and rupee invoices matter more. If you need Gupshup's regulated-industry posture or enterprise volume rates, stay on Gupshup.
Is Gupshup cheaper than Meta Cloud API direct?
Per message, no. Direct Meta has zero BSP markup: you pay ₹0.8631 marketing or ₹0.115 utility and nothing else. At 1 lakh messages a month, Gupshup's fee is about ₹8,800 a month.
Direct Meta costs engineering instead: Business Manager setup, template management, webhook handling, opt-in storage, your own wallet and invoicing, and DPDP Act compliance. If you do not have that team, ₹8,800 a month is cheaper than hiring it. If you do, and your volume is steady above 1 lakh a month, go direct and keep the margin.
Who Gupshup is for
| Use case | Pick Gupshup? |
|---|---|
| Bank, NBFC or fintech needing ISO/SOC posture | Yes, strongest fit |
| Brand sending 1 lakh plus messages a month with negotiable rates | Yes, enterprise discounts are real |
| APAC or SEA expansion needing carrier relationships | Yes |
| Regulated industry (healthcare, BFSI, government) | Yes |
| OTP-heavy sender wanting SMS and WhatsApp on one account | Yes, if volume justifies the onboarding |
| Shopify D2C focused on abandoned cart | No, pick Interakt |
| CRM-heavy ops (Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce) | No, pick WATI |
| Broadcast and click-to-WhatsApp ads under 30,000 a month | No, pick AiSensy |
| Under 5,000 messages a month, variable volume | No, try PayPerWA |
| Dev team wanting zero markup, willing to build | No, go direct Meta Cloud API |
What Gupshup customers say
Across 200 plus Gupshup reviews on G2 and SelectHub (2025 to 2026):
The praise: reliable at scale without dropped messages; APAC carrier coverage that lets teams ship India, Indonesia and Vietnam on one platform; responsive enterprise support once you are on a managed plan.
The complaints: pricing that feels less accessible for small and mid-sized businesses; price increases that arrived without much notice; a campaign UI that takes several steps for sending and follow-up; slow support on the self-serve tier.
That matches what I see. Gupshup is solid at enterprise volume and rough around the edges for small teams.
Source: G2 Gupshup reviews, SelectHub Gupshup reviews.
My take
If you are an Indian D2C, EdTech or services business under 30,000 messages a month, Gupshup is usually not the answer. AiSensy's ₹999 plan, Interakt's Shopify flows or WATI's team inbox will get you live faster and cost less in time, even where Gupshup's per-message fee is lower.
If you are a bank, a fintech or a 1 lakh-plus-messages-a-month enterprise, Gupshup is hard to beat. Carrier relationships, compliance posture, APAC reach and negotiated volume rates all stack up. Go in with eyes open on dollar billing and incoming-message fees, and audit the invoice monthly.
If you are at the small end, under 5,000 messages a month and unsure of your volume, we built PayPerWA for that: Meta Cloud API, ₹0.20 per message, no subscription, rupee billing, failed messages refunded. It is ours, it costs more per message than Gupshup, and it is not a replacement for Gupshup in regulated industries.
Whichever you pick, the BSP is a small part of the result. Template design, opt-in flow, segmentation, chatbot quality and CRM integration decide whether WhatsApp makes you money. That is where we spend our time.
Need help shipping Gupshup, or switching off it?
We handle WhatsApp Business API integrations across Gupshup, WATI, Interakt, AiSensy and direct Meta Cloud API: WhatsApp Business Account setup, Meta Business Manager verification, green tick application, template library and approval, webhook integration with your CRM, Shopify or WooCommerce, opt-in and DPDP Act compliance, AI chatbot layer, and BSP migration without losing templates or opt-in history.
WhatsApp me directly on +91 92771 84741 or see the WhatsApp Business API service page. We do not earn commission on any BSP, so the recommendation is the one that fits your volume.
About the author
Ashish Sharma is the founder of Codingclave, a Lucknow software agency founded in 2017 with 200+ projects shipped, a 4.9-star Google rating across 76 reviews and Top Rated status on Upwork. He works on WhatsApp Business API integrations across Gupshup, WATI, Interakt, AiSensy and direct Meta Cloud API for D2C, fintech, EdTech and healthcare clients, and builds PayPerWA, Codingclave's own pay-per-message WhatsApp platform.
Related guides
- Gupshup SMS pricing India 2026: per-SMS and OTP rates
- WATI vs Interakt vs AiSensy 2026: real pricing and winner
- WhatsApp API pricing India 2026: full BSP comparison
- WhatsApp marketing cost India 2026: real per-message cost and hidden fees
- WhatsApp Business API guide India 2026
- Reduce customer acquisition cost with WhatsApp marketing
- WhatsApp marketing software
- WhatsApp Business API integration service
- AI chatbot development
Frequently asked questions
Gupshup charges a flat $0.001 platform fee per message, about ₹0.09 at ₹88 to the dollar, on top of Meta's India rates. Meta's rates since 1 January 2026 are ₹0.8631 per marketing message and ₹0.115 per utility or authentication message. So a marketing message through Gupshup costs about ₹0.95 before GST (₹1.12 with 18 percent GST) and a utility message about ₹0.20 (₹0.24 with GST). Gupshup's fee also applies to incoming customer messages, which most people miss. I checked these fees on gupshup.ai/pricing on 4 October 2026. There is no monthly subscription or setup fee on the self-serve tier; you pre-fund a wallet and messages are deducted as you send.
Gupshup publishes exactly one plan: the self-serve WhatsApp API tier, where every template and session message costs $0.001, media above 64KB is free of Gupshup's fee, and voice calls cost $0.0001 per second. WhatsApp's own per-message fees are billed at actuals. Everything else, including enterprise managed plans, volume discounts, dedicated account management and AI Agent Studio, is quote-only through sales. In the enterprise quotes I have seen, monthly minimum commits start around ₹4,000 to ₹15,000 with negotiated per-message rates below self-serve once you pass roughly 1 lakh messages a month. If a page claims to list Gupshup's enterprise rate card, treat it as someone's quote, not an official price.
Gupshup prices its self-serve tier in US dollars, not rupees: $0.001 per message. Your rupee cost moves with the exchange rate, which is why you will see ₹0.08, ₹0.085 and ₹0.09 quoted on different sites for the same fee. At ₹88 to the dollar it is ₹0.088. Meta's part of the bill is in rupees for Indian WhatsApp Business Accounts: ₹0.8631 marketing, ₹0.115 utility, ₹0.115 authentication per message, plus 18 percent GST on both the Meta charge and the Gupshup fee. Meta's developer docs list 1 January 2026 as the date India billing moved to rupees, and BSP notices say legacy dollar-billed WABAs must migrate to INR by 31 December 2026.
The official page says no setup fee and no monthly fee on self-serve, and that is true. The costs it does not spell out are: (1) the $0.001 fee is charged on incoming messages too, so a 3,000-reply month adds about ₹264; (2) 18 percent GST on both Meta and Gupshup charges; (3) dollar pricing, so your rupee cost rises when the rupee weakens; (4) wallet pre-pay with idle balance; (5) from 1 October 2026 Meta charges for service messages beyond the first 1,000 per phone number per month, at the utility rate; (6) voice at $0.0001 per second; (7) enterprise minimum commits that you pay whether or not you hit the volume. Budget 20 to 30 percent above the headline number.
Yes. Gupshup is a Meta Business Solution Provider (BSP), which means it hosts your WhatsApp Business API connection, handles template submission, webhooks and wallet billing, and passes Meta's per-message charges through to you at actuals. The BSP layer is where the $0.001 per message goes. Compared with other Indian BSPs, Gupshup's layer is cheap per message but comes without a subscription-tier support desk; WATI, Interakt and AiSensy bundle inbox, CRM and campaign tooling into monthly plans of ₹999 to ₹9,999. Codingclave's own PayPerWA is also built on the Meta Cloud API with a ₹0.20 per message platform fee and no subscription, billed in rupees.
Per message, direct Meta Cloud API is always cheaper because there is no BSP markup: you pay only Meta's ₹0.8631 marketing or ₹0.115 utility rate. At 1 lakh messages a month, Gupshup's fee adds about ₹8,800 a month. Direct Meta costs engineering instead: Meta Business Manager setup, template management, webhook handling, opt-in storage, wallet and invoicing in your own system, and DPDP Act compliance. For a team without those engineers, Gupshup's ₹8,800 a month is cheaper than one developer's salary. If you have the team and send 1 lakh plus messages a month consistently, direct Meta wins on cost.
For 30,000 messages a month (20,000 marketing plus 10,000 utility), Meta's charges alone are ₹18,412. On top of that, Gupshup self-serve adds ₹2,640 in platform fees, giving about ₹21,050 before GST. WATI's plans run ₹2,499 to ₹9,999 a month plus a per-message markup, Interakt ₹2,142 to ₹6,963, AiSensy from ₹999, and PayPerWA ₹6,000 at ₹0.20 per message. Gupshup's BSP layer is the cheapest of the subscription-free options at this volume; what you give up is the inbox, CRM and campaign tooling that WATI, Interakt and AiSensy include. See the full Gupshup vs WATI modelling in our WhatsApp API pricing comparison guide.
Gupshup sells AI Agent Studio and vertical AI bundles for BFSI, retail and healthcare on top of the BSP fees. None of it is priced publicly; every quote I have seen was per-seat or per-conversation, negotiated case by case, and bundled into an enterprise commit. For most brands we work with, running your own chatbot layer (OpenAI or Anthropic models with retrieval over your knowledge base) on the raw Gupshup BSP is cheaper and gives you control of the prompts, the data and the handoff logic. Buy Gupshup's AI bundle when you want one vendor accountable for the whole stack and your compliance team prefers that.
The self-serve wallet makes Gupshup usable for small businesses, and the $0.001 fee is genuinely low. The honest trade-off: Gupshup is built for enterprise senders doing 1 lakh plus messages a month. Self-serve support is slow, the campaign UI gets consistent complaints on G2 and SelectHub, and the wallet is in dollars. Under 30,000 messages a month, AiSensy (₹999 a month, simplest UI), Interakt (Shopify D2C) or WATI (CRM-heavy teams) usually give a better day-to-day experience. Under 5,000 messages a month with variable volume, PayPerWA (ours, ₹0.20 per message, rupee billing, failed messages refunded) is the lower-friction choice.
Two layers again. Meta made service conversations free from November 2024, and from 1 October 2026 it charges for service messages beyond the first 1,000 per business phone number each month, at the utility rate (₹0.115 in India). Utility templates sent inside an open 24-hour service window stay free from Meta. Gupshup's layer is separate: its $0.001 session-message fee applies to every message inside the window, outgoing and incoming, and always has. So a support-heavy account with 10,000 replies a month pays Gupshup about ₹880 even in a month where Meta charges nothing.
Yes. We are a Lucknow software agency founded in 2017 with 200+ projects shipped, and WhatsApp Business API integration is a regular part of that work across Gupshup, WATI, Interakt, AiSensy and direct Meta Cloud API. For Gupshup specifically we handle WhatsApp Business Account setup, Meta Business Manager verification, green tick application, template design and approval, webhook integration with your CRM, Shopify or WooCommerce, opt-in flow and DPDP Act compliance, and an AI chatbot layer if you want one. If your volume is small and variable, we will tell you to use PayPerWA or AiSensy instead; we do not earn commission on any BSP.