WhatsApp Business has two components. There's the WhatsApp Business app for small businesses. There's also the WhatsApp Business platform, an API, for larger businesses like banks, airlines or e-commerce companies. The first 1,000 conversations on the platform each month are free. After that, businesses are charged per conversation, which includes all messages delivered in a 24-hour session, based on regional rates.
There's considerable room for growth in the U.S., where WhatsApp is still a "a largely untapped resource by small businesses," said Rob Retzlaff, executive director of The Connected Commerce Council, a non-profit organization that promotes small businesses' access to digital technologies and tools. One driver for Meta in promoting WhatsApp Business is advertising revenue. "Click- to-message is already a multi-billion dollar business for us and we continue to see strong double-digit year-over-year growth," Sandberg said on the second quarter earnings call. Click-to-message "is one of our fastest growing ad formats for us," she added. The company does not break out how much of the business comes from WhatsApp versus Messenger or Instagram.