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Put in your expected monthly message volumes and get a monthly WhatsApp Business Platform bill in US dollars and dirhams, split by message category. The rates come from Meta's own rate card, they are printed on the page with the date they were read, and you can edit every one of them.
What a WhatsApp bill is made of, before you touch a single field.
Meta charges per delivered template message, not per conversation, and has done since July 1, 2025. On the card effective July 1, 2026, read on September 5, 2026, a marketing template delivered to a UAE number costs USD 0.0499, and a utility or authentication template costs USD 0.0157. Meta's own dirham card puts the same two at AED 0.1832 and AED 0.0576, which is the dollar figure at the peg of 1 USD to AED 3.6725 (Meta rate table, u.ae fact sheet).
Two rules decide how much of your traffic you actually pay for. Utility templates are free when they are delivered inside the 24 hour customer service window that opens when a customer messages you, and every message is free inside the 72 hour free entry point window that opens when someone reaches you from a Click to WhatsApp ad or a Facebook Page button and you reply within 24 hours. Marketing and authentication templates are charged either way, and non template service messages are free (Meta pricing).
Rates are set per country. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar each have their own card; Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman and Yemen share a Rest of Middle East card. And almost every business pays a business service provider on top of Meta, so the calculator takes that markup as an input rather than pretending it does not exist. For the longer write up of the pricing model, read our note on WhatsApp Business API pricing in the UAE.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.
AED 4,310.93 at the dirham peg
| Category | Delivered | Charged | Rate USD | Cost USD | Cost AED |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | 20,000 | 20,000 | 0.0499 | 998.00 | 3,665.15 |
| Utility | 12,000 | 7,200 | 0.0157 | 113.04 | 415.14 |
| Authentication | 4,000 | 4,000 | 0.0157 | 62.80 | 230.63 |
| Authentication international | 0 | 0 | 0.0510 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Service | 9,000 | 0 | 0.0000 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
Seeded from Meta's rate card for United Arab Emirates, effective July 1, 2026, read on September 5, 2026. Rates change. If your rate card shows something else, type it in and the numbers above follow.
| Category | Rate USD a delivered message | At the peg | Meta's own AED card |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1833 | 0.1832 | ||
| 0.0577 | 0.0576 | ||
| 0.0577 | 0.0576 | ||
| 0.1873 | 0.1872 | ||
| 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
The rules the model above follows, from Meta's own documentation, checked on September 5, 2026.
An illustrative UAE retailer, 45,000 deliveries a month, on the figures the calculator opens with. The business is made up. The rates are not.
Say the retailer sends 20,000 marketing templates, 12,000 utility templates and 4,000 authentication templates a month, and its agents write 9,000 free form replies inside open service windows. Four in ten of the utility templates land inside a window that the customer opened. No traffic comes from Click to WhatsApp ads, so the free entry point share is zero. Rates are the UAE card.
The arithmetic is the same as the calculator: deliveries minus the free ones, multiplied by the rate for that category.
| Category | Delivered | Charged | Rate USD | Cost USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | 20,000 | 20,000 | 0.0499 | 998.00 |
| Utility | 12,000 | 7,200 | 0.0157 | 113.04 |
| Authentication | 4,000 | 4,000 | 0.0157 | 62.80 |
| Service | 9,000 | 0 | 0.0000 | 0.00 |
AED 4,310.93 at the peg
31,200 of the 45,000 deliveries are charged. Marketing is 44 percent of the deliveries and 85 percent of the bill.
Take it from 40 percent to 100 percent and the Meta charge falls to USD 1,060.80, AED 3,895.79. Utility is the only line the window touches, so the total barely moves for a sender whose bill is mostly marketing.
Set the free entry point share to 10 percent and the Meta charge falls to USD 1,056.46, AED 3,879.83. It comes off every category, marketing included, which is why it is the only lever that touches the marketing line.
Send the same traffic to Rest of Middle East numbers and the Meta charge is USD 783.92, AED 2,878.95, on the same volumes and the same window share.
A provider markup sits on top of all of these. If a contract charged half a cent on each of the 31,200 messages Meta bills for, that would be USD 156.00 a month on top, taking the total to USD 1,329.84, AED 4,883.84. We are not saying that is anyone's rate. Read yours off your own agreement and put it in the markup field.
Six things decide the number, and only one of them is the rate card.
Marketing is charged on every delivery and no window frees it, and on the UAE card it costs about three times a utility message. On the worked example above, marketing is 44 percent of the deliveries and 85 percent of the bill. Moving a message from marketing to utility, where the content genuinely is a transaction update, is the cheapest change most businesses can make.
Utility templates delivered inside an open 24 hour window cost nothing, and so does any non template reply. A utility flow that answers people who wrote to you is close to free; the same flow pushed to people who did not write is charged in full. The service window share field is where this shows up, and it moves the utility line only.
A Click to WhatsApp ad or a Facebook Page button opens a 72 hour window in which everything is free, marketing included. Businesses that route their paid social traffic into WhatsApp rather than a landing page pay less per conversation, though the ad spend is a separate cost this calculator does not model.
The rate follows the recipient. On the cards read for this page the UAE marketing rate is higher than the Rest of Middle East rate, while UAE utility is higher than the Rest of Middle East utility rate as well. A contact list spread across the Gulf has a blended rate, so run the calculator once per rate card and add the results.
A per message markup of a fraction of a cent looks small next to Meta's rate and is not small at volume. Check whether your provider bills on delivered messages, on messages Meta charges for, on active contacts or as a flat platform fee, because the four give very different answers at the same traffic.
Blocked or low quality templates get paused, and a new business portfolio starts limited in how many unique numbers it can message outside a window in 24 hours. Neither is a line on the invoice, but both decide how much of your planned volume you can actually send in month one.
Written out so you can decide whether the estimate is worth anything to you.
What people ask before they budget for WhatsApp.
We scope, build and run WhatsApp chatbots in Arabic and English across the GCC. Meta bills you directly for messages; we do not resell them and do not mark them up.
Conversational AI consultancyA number on this page is a budget. Turning it into a working WhatsApp channel means templates Meta will approve, flows that answer in the Arabic your customers write, a handover to a person, and an integration with the systems you already run. That is what we build.