Respond.io pricing in 2026: what a small team actually pays

Respond.io's pricing page is one of the clearer ones in this category: four plans, a monthly and an annual price, and a feature list you can read in a minute. The bill is less clear, because three meters run underneath the plan price — users, monthly active contacts and AI credits — and a fourth, Meta's message fees, is billed by Meta and, in Respond.io's words, "not included in any respond.io subscription".

This post sets out the plans as published in September 2026, what each meter does, and what two realistic months cost a small team.

What do Respond.io's plans cost in 2026?

From Respond.io's pricing page, as of September 2026. The headline prices are for annual billing; monthly billing is about 25 percent more.

There's a 7-day free trial with Growth's features for 5 users and 1,000 contacts, minus broadcasts, and no card is needed. No setup fee is listed.

What each plan includes

Starter is an inbox. You get team inboxes across channels, the mobile app, AI Prompt and AI Assist for your agents' replies, basic reports, two-factor authentication and the website widgets. You don't get broadcasts, workflow automation or AI Agents. Its unlimited contacts are the trade for that.

Growth is where Respond.io becomes a platform: broadcasts, the workflow builder, AI Agents that answer customers, advanced reports, Zapier and Make, and the developer API. This is the plan most small teams actually need if they want anything automated.

Advanced adds phone and email masking, multiple workspaces, HTTP requests inside workflows, webhooks, single sign-on and custom channels. That's for an operation with a developer or several brands.

Enterprise removes the user cap and raises the workspace and API limits.

What else does Respond.io charge for?

Users. Starter's 5 seats and Growth's 10 are generous for a small team. Every seat above that is $12, $20 or $24 a month depending on the plan.

Monthly active contacts. On Growth and Advanced you start with 1,000 contacts a month and pay $12 or $15 for each block of 100 above that. A busy month with 1,500 people messaging you adds $60 on Growth. Starter has no cap here, which is why it's the cheap plan for a purely inbound inbox.

AI credits. Each plan includes a monthly allowance of credits that the AI features consume. Overage is $15 per 1,000 extra credits, with a hard cap at 200 percent of your allowance, so the AI bill can at most double, then it stops.

Meta's fees on top

Respond.io is a Meta Business Solution Provider, so your WhatsApp messages are billed by Meta on Meta's rate card. The page states that WhatsApp fees are not included in any subscription and does not mention a markup, which is better than most of the category.

Since July 2025 Meta charges per delivered template message rather than per 24-hour conversation. Replies to a customer within 24 hours of their last message are free, utility templates inside that window are free, and anything within 72 hours of a click-to-WhatsApp ad is free. Marketing, utility and authentication templates outside those windows are charged at the customer's market rate. Meta's published rates in USD, September 2026:

Two worked months

Take an online furniture store in São Paulo with three people answering WhatsApp.

200 conversations a month. Most are customers asking about delivery and stock; say 160 inbound threads and 40 order-update templates sent after the 24-hour window closed. Meta's charge is 40 × $0.0068, about $0.27. On Starter that's $99.27 a month, or $79.27 billed annually. If the store wants to send a Friday promotion to its list, Starter can't: it needs Growth, and the bill jumps to about $199.

1,000 conversations a month. Now it's on Growth. Say 600 inbound, 250 utility templates and 150 marketing templates. Meta's charge is $1.70 plus $9.38, about $11.08. If those 1,000 threads are 1,000 distinct contacts, the store is exactly at its 1,000 monthly active contacts; 200 more people writing in adds $24. Total: about $234 on monthly billing or $194 on annual, with 10 seats and 10,000 AI credits included.

If the store instead broadcast one campaign to 1,000 Brazilian contacts, Meta's charge for that campaign alone is $62.50, more than the rest of the month's messaging combined. Broadcasting is where Meta's fees stop being a rounding error.

Add-ons and overages

Respond.io's published extras are the three meters above: extra users, extra contact blocks and extra AI credits. There's no listed setup fee, no listed fee for adding a WhatsApp number, and no listed per-message markup. Anything beyond that goes through sales on the Enterprise plan.

Setup and contracts

You're on the official WhatsApp Business API: a Meta Business Manager account, business verification for the green badge and higher sending limits, and message templates approved by Meta before you can send them. The trial connects without a card. Annual plans are paid up front.

Who Respond.io is right for

A team of five to ten agents that handles WhatsApp plus Instagram, Messenger, LINE, web chat or email in one queue, with routing rules and reporting, is Respond.io's customer. At that size $159 to $199 a month is reasonable, the unified inbox is genuinely good, and Meta's fees are passed through at cost.

It's a poor fit for a one- or two-person business. Starter at $79 to $99 is an inbox without automation: fine for sharing one number across five people, but it doesn't answer anyone. The plan that answers customers for you starts at $159 to $199 before Meta's charges.

Replai compared

Replai is for the small end. It pairs to the WhatsApp number you already have as a linked device, like WhatsApp Web, so there's no API application, no business verification and no per-message fee from Meta. Plans are a flat $19, $49 or $99 a month with the AI included: Starter covers 120 conversations a cycle on one number, Growth 300 across up to three numbers with outbound campaigns and Google Sheets lead capture, Pro 600 across up to five. A conversation is up to five bot replies in one thread; a top-up of 100 costs $9, or $8 on Growth and $7 on Pro. The furniture store's 200-conversation month fits Growth at $49; its 1,000-conversation month is Pro plus four top-ups at the Pro rate, $127.

The trade-offs are real. Replai doesn't give you the green verified badge, doesn't send Meta-approved broadcast templates, doesn't do Instagram or Messenger, and runs on an unofficial WhatsApp library, so a ban risk exists that Respond.io's official route doesn't carry. Replai's warm-up, rate limits and inbound-first defaults reduce that risk; nothing removes it. If you need multichannel routing for a team, pay Respond.io. If you need your WhatsApp answered, the 7-day trial at replai.pm needs no card.

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