It is changing the per-conversation rate for businesses, where a conversation is a 24-hour thread between sellers and users. Rates for utility messages are being cut and for marketing messages, raised.
Meta charges businesses through four categories of messages - marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries).

The new utility rates will be implemented on 4 August, while the new marketing conversation rates will be implemented on October 4 this year. These are the first updates on conversation rates since WhatsApp started charging category-wise and not a fixed amount for all conversations.

Marketing rates are also fluctuating for the merchants in various countries. For example, in India, rates of marketing are up from $0.0099 to $0.0107 (+8%), while utility conversation rates are reduced by the company from $0.0042 to $0.0014 (-67%).

It will make businesses believe that this is where they should start communicating with their customers over WhatsApp.

Users have been complaining of an ever-increasing number of spam WhatsApp messages over the last year, so the company has been implementing guardrails slowly to protect users from them.

Earlier this year, the company started testing limits on marketing messages that are sent to a user in India through "Per-User Marketing Template Message Limits" guidelines. Meta does not define a hard limit on messages sent by a brand, but it blocks the messages that are "less likely to be read."

Last month, Meta said it expanded these guidelines to all regions after the test period.

"People turn to WhatsApp to do everything from asking questions about a product, receiving a boarding pass, or getting an offer for a holiday sale. There can be too much of a good thing, so we're working to find the right combination of tools to get this right so people continue having a great experience messaging businesses on WhatsApp," a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.

With WhatsApp Business, Meta now generates more revenue. The company said last year that the number of its WhatsApp Business users had reached over 200 million.