# ⑥ And a date: 1 October 2026

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.

## Notes

- 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](https://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.