Broadcast cost calculator

These Are Next Month’s Prices, Not This Month’s

Read the small print under the figures before you read the figures. The rates in the broadcast cost calculator above are Meta’s card that takes effect on 1 October 2026, transcribed from its own USD table on 3 September 2026. They are not the prices in force today. Meta’s current card runs until then, and some of its numbers are different.

That is deliberate. If you are planning a campaign for the autumn, next month’s card is the one you want, and a calculator quietly quoting the old prices would give you a budget that expires before the send does. If you are pressing send this week, treat everything here as a forecast and check your own invoice against it afterwards.

What the Broadcast Cost Calculator Is Actually Pricing

One send. One template message to each person on your list, priced by Meta and nothing else.

It is not your monthly bill, not your software subscription and not a conversation charge. Meta bills per delivered message, so the number on screen is the size of your list multiplied by one per message rate, and the whole of the panel is about getting that rate right. Service is the one chip that subtracts before it multiplies, and there is a section on it below.

Two things are outside it and stay outside it. What you pay your messaging platform is a separate bill, and the panel says on its own face that DMly adds no margin to Meta’s rates. And nothing you receive is priced here, because incoming messages are not what Meta charges a business for.

Four Controls, and Only One of Them Is Obvious

The left card asks four questions, in the order they matter.

• Country you message into. The hint under it is the one people get wrong: Meta prices by where the message lands, not by where you are. A London salon messaging a customer in Lagos is billed at Nigerian rates.
• Market it bills at. Filled in for you from the country, and editable on purpose. More on this below, because it is the part most likely to be wrong.
• Message category. Five chips: Marketing, Utility, Authentication, International authentication and Service. This is where the money is.
• Recipients in this broadcast. How many people the send goes to. It opens on 500.

Change any of them and everything reprices immediately. There is no submit button and nothing is sent anywhere.

Meta Prices Markets, Not Countries

This is the part worth understanding, and the panel is unusually honest about it.

There are 249 countries in the picker and 47 markets on the card. Some countries have a rate of their own: pick the United Kingdom and the panel tells you it has its own line. Most do not. They fall into a region, or into a catch-all called Other, and they are billed at that region’s rate.

The mapping from a country to its region is the tool’s reading of Meta’s card, not a boundary Meta publishes in that form. The panel says so in the hint under the market picker and then does the honest thing: it leaves the market as a dropdown you can change. If you know from your own invoices that a country bills somewhere else, set it yourself and the figures follow your answer instead.

The practical consequence is that a country with its own rate is a firm number and a country resolving to a region is an estimate. Both are useful. Only one of them is worth building a budget on without checking.

The Category Is Where the Money Is

Leave the panel exactly as it opens, on 500 recipients in the United Kingdom, and marketing prices the send at $31.75. Tap Utility and the same 500 messages cost $11.00.

Same list, same people, same day, nearly three times the bill. Nothing about volume did that, and nothing about the wording did either. The category is a label on the template, and it is the single biggest lever on the page.

The comparison strip underneath the headline exists for exactly this. It prices your send in every category at once, so you can see what the choice is worth before you go and look at your templates.

The classification is not yours to choose freely, though. A message about a booking somebody already made is a utility message. The same message with an offer attached to it is a marketing message, and it is priced accordingly. The saving comes from noticing that half your marketing templates were never marketing, not from relabelling the ones that are.

Two Chips, One Number, and a Category That Is Not Free

Two readings of the comparison strip look like faults and are not.

Utility and Authentication give the same figure in every market on this card. The panel says so under the chips rather than letting the repetition look like a bug. They are two categories over one rate, so a business sending login codes and a business sending delivery updates pay the same per message.

International authentication reads “Not priced separately” in most markets, and that does not mean free. It means Meta does not publish a separate international rate for that market on this card, so there is no number to show you. A handful of markets do have one: Bangladesh, for instance, carries an international authentication rate of $0.096 against a domestic authentication rate of $0.0037, which is a difference large enough to be worth checking if you send codes across borders.

Service Messages Have a Price on This Card

The fifth chip is the one to look at twice. Service messages are priced on the 1 October card, at the same rate as utility in every market shown. On the card before it, they were not priced at all. There is an allowance with it, though: the first 1,000 service messages a month on each business phone number are free, and Meta charges only from the 1,001st. That is why the comparison strip prices 500 service messages at nothing while the same 500 as utility cost $11.00.

That is still a real change to the shape of the bill rather than a small adjustment to a number, but the allowance decides who feels it. A salon answering a few hundred messages a month never reaches the 1,001st and pays nothing on this chip. A busy inbox passes the allowance early in the month and pays the full utility rate on everything after it, with no rollover into the next month. If your messaging is mostly answering people who wrote to you first, this is the line to model before October rather than after it.

Price it the way you would price a campaign: put your monthly volume of those replies into the recipients box, tap Service, and read the total. It is a forecast rather than an invoice, but it is the right order of magnitude and it is available now.

A Send Worked Through, Twice

The arithmetic is one multiplication, which is the point. Everything hard about it happens before the multiplication, and on Service the only extra step is taking the free thousand off first.

Five hundred marketing messages into the United Kingdom, on this card, at $0.0635 each. That is $31.75 for the send, and the row underneath reads $63.50 per thousand so you can scale it in your head.

Now change the country to India and nothing else. The rate becomes $0.0118 and the same 500 messages cost $5.90. The list did not change, the template did not change, and the bill fell by more than four fifths.

That is why the country field sits at the top of the panel rather than at the bottom, and it is why a list spanning several countries cannot be priced with a single run. Price each country separately and add them up, or price the largest group and treat the rest as a variance you have named.

What the Broadcast Cost Calculator Does Not Model

Five things sit outside the number, and four of them can only push your real bill downwards.

• Volume tiers. Meta prices by volume tier on utility and authentication only, and this card is the base tier, so a high volume sender may pay less than the figure here on those two. Marketing and service have no volume tiers, so sending more of either buys no discount. The panel says so under the recipients box and makes no attempt to model it.
• Undelivered messages. You are charged per delivered message, and the calculator prices your whole list. Every bad number, blocked contact and dead handset is a message you typed into the box and will not be billed for.
• Currency. The figures are dollars, read from Meta’s USD card. If you are billed in something else, the conversion happens after this.
• Free entry points. Nothing here knows how a conversation started, and some of them are cheaper than a template.
• Your software. The subscription is a separate bill and is not in this number. What is in it is Meta’s rate with nothing added, which the panel states on its own face.

The whole panel is built on the server before any script runs, so the figures are already correct and readable the moment the page loads. Typing only reprices them.

Before You Trust the Broadcast Cost Calculator’s Number

Four checks, in order, and they take about a minute between them.

• Is the country the recipient’s country? Not yours, and not the country your business is registered in.
• Does the market look right? If the country resolved into a region rather than carrying its own rate, the figure is an estimate. Compare it against an invoice if you have one.
• Is the category the one your template is actually approved under? Not the one you think it deserves.
• Is the recipient count the list you will really send to? After opt-outs, after duplicates, after the numbers that have been bouncing since March.

Then price it again on the day you send, because the panel’s own closing line is right: Meta revises these rates, and the card under your budget can move between the plan and the send.

What the Send Is Worth, Not Just What It Costs

A cost on its own decides nothing. Thirty one dollars is either cheap or wasteful depending entirely on what comes back, and the number that answers that is a different one.

Put the cost per message from here into the WhatsApp marketing ROI calculator and it will tell you what the send returns per dollar spent. If you are pricing a month of messaging rather than one campaign, the WhatsApp API pricing calculator is the same rate card with monthly and annual totals. And before any of it, check whether your account can even reach the whole list inside a day with the WhatsApp messaging limit calculator, because an undelivered message is a message that never had the chance to earn anything.

The last thing worth saying is about who receives it. A broadcast to everyone is the version of this that costs the most and returns the least, and the cost per message is identical either way. With DMly you can pick who a broadcast goes to by service, spend or last visit, which changes the return without changing a single figure in the panel above.