Since 1 August Meta bills the WhatsApp AI agent per token

On 1 August 2026 Meta moved the WhatsApp Business Agent to per-token billing (a global rate on the order of USD 2 per million tokens). Anyone who left it on in March “to see how it went” now has a new line. It is not the end of the world; it is the end of the illusion of free AI in the thread.

More important: that agent does not write to your inventory or your invoice. It talks. AI in the process is still read, sort, continue. If the customer pays, the gateway and the system find out. If Meta’s agent promises a discount that does not exist, you pay the token and the complaint. Respond.io with templates and a queue lets you switch off what you do not control.

What to do this week

• Check whether the Business Agent is on in Business Manager.
• Measure messages vs tokens in the first half of August.
• Decide: templated utility, human in a queue, or a model in YOUR software — not a Meta add-on with no owner.

Cheap token, expensive hallucination. The price was never zero: it was opaque.

Let’s talk about the channel if August already shows on the invoice and nobody knows who turned the agent on.