Europe is in a weird middle-ground where WhatsApp is still dominant for person-to-person messaging. Not only was SMS costly back when WhatsApp emerged, users are also split 50/50 between Apple and Android, and SMS between them wasn't nearly as good as Whatsapp for the longest time. But WhatsApp Business is not a big thing. Of course that's vastly overgeneralizing, local differences exist, Europe is a big continent. But I mostly see SMS for transactional messages, and platforms like Instagram DMs for actual two-way communication

Interestingly enough, Instagram has none of this weird pricing stuff on their messaging API, despite being run by the same overlords

Yeah, the July 2025 shift to per-message billing made marketing way pricier. The country spread is wild too, India is ~$0.0094/msg vs Germany ~$0.124

I mean surely this was always going to happen? A fixed fee just means less frequent users subsidising everyone else.

I left WA in 2019, while the business api program was still very early, but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good. SMS pricing varies wildly by destination country, sometimes by destination network.

Skimming the page, also note that the quoted prices are for marketting messages, other types of messages are much less expensive.

For SMS, the access to a specific consumer is often gated by a monopoly (that user’s telco provider) so they get to charge whatever they like. Therefore you see the variance (the greediness of individual telco). When WhatsApp join in the business messaging game, they want to maintain good relationship with the telcos and they also like the sweet margins they see they are making there.

> but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good

People switched to whatsapp because:

1. It was free unlike SMS 2. It was ubiquitously available like SMS (unlike BBM) 3. It was genuinely a good product.

This feels like Whatsapp (Meta) is rug pulling the users once everyone has moved to Whatsapp, almost analogous to what Uber did. Drive Taxis out of business with predatory pricing, and then increase the prices.

As a whatsapp user, I am quite happy that marketing messages are expensive. Puts a price on spam, which means I get less of it. If they want to send me something actually useful that usually falls into one of the other much cheaper categories

Would be nice if there was an easier way to get an API to message a small number of people though, without the ceremony meant for businesses that want to message thousands or millions