UPCOMING IN 2025

PER MESSAGE PRICING AND VOLUME TIER BASED PRICING w.e.f July 01 , 2025

Transition from Conversation based Pricing to Per message pricing and many other changes across 2024 and 2025.

Refer this guide

TEMPLATE CATEGORY UPDATES w.e.f July 01, 2025

• Meta is refining the definition of utility templates to ensure they remain relevant and engaging. Some use cases may move between categories.

• Updated category guidelines will go live with the pricing changes.

For a template to be categorized as utility, it must meet the following additional criteria:

• Must be non-promotional, not containing any promotional or persuasive intent.
• Must be either (1) specific to, or requested by, the user (clearly related to their order, account, services, or transactions), or (2) essential or critical to the user (e.g., to ensure user safety).

This means that starting July 1, 2025, Meta will:

• Categorize newly-created templates per their updated definition of utility.
• Update any approved templates to their respective category (utility or marketing), based on their updated definition of utility. Consistent with today, businesses will receive webhooks and email notices confirming template category updates.

The Template Category Explainer PDF by Meta linked below reflects the new utility guidelines, and highlights all current template category guidelines across all message template categories.

Template Category Explainer PDF

Updates to marketing message experimentation on WhatsApp

[NEW ADDITION ON 23rd May 2025]: "We continue to explore ways to ensure WhatsApp is the best place for people and businesses to connect and get things done. We use ongoing analyses to understand the types of marketing message experiences that most resonate with consumers. Our learnings are reflected in the products and best practices we build for businesses to ensure their continued success. Currently, we do not deliver marketing messages to a very small percentage of consumers to assess impact on engagement. Over the coming months, we will update this group and businesses may notice a small delivery decrease. 

Further details [no action required]:

• Messages that are undeliverable will return an error message webhook (“User’s number is part of an experiment”).
• Any marketing template used in ongoing conversations will be exempt.
• Businesses will not be charged if a marketing template is not delivered.
  In order to protect the validity of the analyses, and ensure the best possible business and consumer experience, we cannot provide any exceptions or opt-outs."

JUNE 2025

[NEW ADDITION ON 23rd May 2025]: Aligning Per-User Marketing Limits with Upcoming Per Message Pricing Changes
Gradually rolling out from late Q2 2025, the per user marketing limit will align with upcoming per-message pricing changes. Previously, the limit only applied to marketing template messages that would normally open a new marketing conversation, and businesses could send one additional marketing template message if a marketing conversation is already open between you and a WhatsApp user.

Now businesses will be able to send an unlimited number of marketing messages, however each message delivered will now count towards the per user marketing limit. One exception is, if a person responds to a marketing message it will start a 24h customer service window. Marketing messages sent within this window will not count towards a person’s limit.

Know more

[NEW ADDITION ON 23rd May 2025]: Reminder: Continued rollout of recently announced improvements to per user marketing message limits.

Since introducing the per user limit on marketing messages, Meta has seen improvements to user sentiment and business performance. In February, they shared additional changes which will continue to roll out in June. 

A reminder on the changes [no action needed]:

Now, if a person’s overall inbox has a low number of messages or they have not engaged with many of the marketing messages they received lately they may receive fewer marketing messages to ensure a healthy balance. Likewise, if they show high engagement with marketing messages, they may receive more. These changes apply to all marketing messages irrespective of the surface (e.g. Cloud API, MM Lite API, etc). By limiting delivery to people who are less receptive, your marketing messages will reach those who are most likely to read them, ensuring your budget is spent more efficiently. You can further optimize performance with Marketing Messages Lite API which may deliver improved performance compared to Cloud API, with added features and a better experience for people.

MAY 2025

New Text Enforcements for utility messages on Cloud API and marketing message templates

As part of their ongoing efforts to enhance platform performance and user experience, Meta has been implementing changes to the body component of marketing and utility templates sent via Cloud API and MM Lite API.

Key Changes Introduced by Meta:
1. Marketing and Utility Templates exceeding 550 characters in the body will be rejected
2. Marketing and Utility Templates containing more than 10 emojis in the body will also be rejected.

These changes are designed to improve deliverability, platform performance, and overall user engagement. Some of these changes are already under testing on select WABAs by Meta.

In case a WABA selected for this restriction, Gupshup interfaces and APIs will share the reason for failed template creation as - 'The Body (or Content) field can't have more than 550 characters'. No changes expected to be made in existing approved templates that may not be compliant with the 2 new changes.

APRIL 2025

Marketing Lite API support for all geographies

Starting April 2025, Marketing Lite API is be available across all geographies, enabling businesses
worldwide to leverage its capabilities for streamlined and efficient messaging. 

Tappable Image Header support added

This will give the ability for people to preview the CTA destination, allowing them to assess the relevance of the CTA before taking any action or navigate to the CTA destination by tapping on the image header, in addition to the CTA button. This change tends to drive >10%* click-through-rate improvement for the most popular format of marketing messages template: Single image + text +CTA button.

Text truncation now expanded to more message types

• Text messages
• Location messages
• Documentation messages
  
  Previously, this only applied to Single Image + Text + CTA button templates

New restrictions on template category misuse :
Apart from the restrictions on utility misuse applied in March, Meta will now also auto-apply templates as Marketing if detected as such while applying for templates. Read more

Multiple CTA Buttons in WhatsApp Flows

Meta now allows to send message templates with multiple CTA buttons, including WhatsApp FlowCTAs, directly via API or WhatsApp Manager. You can even add icons!

Pause of Marketing Messages to US Customers

WhatsApp adoption is still growing in US which makes users from US less responsive to marketing messages. To enhance the consumer experience, Meta has introduced a pause on marketing messages—with the goal of improving engagement and thus better results for businesses.

📌 What You Need to Know:

• Starting April 1, 2025, the API behavior will align with Per-User Marketing Limits. Thus any attempt to send a marketing template message to a US phone number will result in error code 131049 (for Cloud API)

Recommendations:

• Focus on utility, authentication, and service conversations.
• Use Click-to-WhatsApp Ads to engage US customers.
• Benefit from free service conversations and lower global utility rates.

MARCH 2025

Category Misuse restrictions

While Meta continues to invest to ensure a valuable messaging experience on their platform, starting March 17, WhatsApp has started to introduce new measures to prevent misuse of message template category guidelines. These will roll out globally by April 1.

For businesses that Meta detects are misusing their template categorization system to secure the utility category for templates that should be categorized as marketing, Meta will send written notice of this detection. If they detect misuse after this warning, they will introduce the following restrictions which would prevent the WhatsApp Business Account from using the WhatsApp Business Platform for utility messaging for 7 days:

• Reject all approved utility templates
• For 7 days – Disable category reviews for these templates
• For 7 days – Disable creation of new utility templates

For businesses that have been restricted previously, if they detect continued misuse of the template categorization system, Meta will re-introduce these restrictions for 30 days.

Businesses that believe Meta has applied these restrictions in error can request a review. These restrictions will be in addition to the automatic updates of utility templates that should be categorized as marketing.

Read more about this feature here