On Wednesday, Meta declared that it will impose fees on developers who use chatbots on WhatsApp in areas where authorities are compelling the company to permit them. The action follows the company’s January 15 restriction on third-party chatbots on WhatsApp.
For the time being, Meta will impose fees on developers in Italy, where the competition watchdog requested that the company halt its approach in December of last year. According to the firm, non-template responses will start to cost more on February 16. For AI responses, Meta intends to charge developers $0.0691, €0.0572, or £0.0498 per message. If customers are asking AI chatbots thousands of questions per day, developers may face high costs.
Meta notified developers earlier this month to create an exception for Italian phone lines so that AI chatbots could assist those users. The company made no mention of charging developers at the time.
As of right now, WhatsApp charges businesses to use its API for a variety of template responses to users, including marketing, utility, and authentication use cases. This includes notifications that consumers receive regarding shipping updates and payment reminders.
A Meta representative told TechCrunch, “We are introducing pricing for the companies that choose to use our platform to provide those services where we are legally required to provide AI chatbots through the WhatsApp business API.” If Meta is forced to give in and let developers run their chatbots, this might also set a precedent for other regions.
This past October, Meta initially declared that it would use its WhatsApp Business API to exclude all third-party AI chatbots from utilizing WhatsApp.
Meta claimed that its systems were under stress and weren’t built to manage answers from AI bots.
“Our systems were not built to handle the load that the introduction of AI chatbots on our Business API caused. This reasoning presupposes that WhatsApp functions as a de facto app store. The business stated at the time that “app stores, their websites, and industry partnerships are the route to market for AI companies, not the WhatsApp Business Platform.”
Since then, anticompetitive investigations have been launched in a number of regions, including the EU, Italy, and Brazil. At first, Brazil’s watchdog requested that Meta halt the policy. But last week, a Brazilian court overturned the preliminary ruling preventing the new policy, siding with Meta. According to TechCrunch, the business has requested that developers refrain from making their AI chatbots available to Brazilian users.
Since the guideline went into effect, developers are required to refer users of their AI chatbot on WhatsApp to their website or app by sending them a pre-written message. Last year, companies including Microsoft, Perplexity, and OpenAI warned that their WhatsApp bots will stop functioning after January 15 and advised consumers to use them on other platforms instead.