Replying in free-form text inside the 24-hour window is free today. From 1 October 2026 Meta charges for it, per message, at the same rate as utility and authentication templates in your market. That same day it also starts charging for utility templates sent as a reply inside an open window.
⚠ The 24-hour window does NOT go away. It still exists, it opens and resets with each customer message, and it still decides whether you may send free-form text. What changes is that it stops being free.
Still free: the 72-hour window when the conversation starts from a click-to-WhatsApp ad or from a Facebook or Instagram button.
It is a Meta change, it applies to everyone equally, and it changes nothing on our side: your Connect plan stays the same.
Verified against Meta's documentation on 2026-09-06 — "Upcoming pricing updates for Meta Business Agent, service and utility messages", where the customer-service-window row reads verbatim "Free until October 1, 2026".
Meta charges per delivered message, not per conversation: per-conversation pricing existed until 1 July 2025 and Meta retired it. Estimating per conversation will give you far less than the real figure.
🔴 Phase 90 — and the standalone WhatsApp questions have their own pages, public and session-free: waiaconnect.com/en/guides. Nine questions, one page each — how to keep Meta from banning your number, how many messages a new number can send, what happens if you turn the phone off, why you cannot send while it shows as connected, and five more. Several carry numbers measured across the numbers we operate, with their date. You can hand them to a customer who has not signed up yet.