Costs, alerts and the service-message allowance

Costs in the sidebar (owners, admins and viewers) shows what WhatsApp and AI cost a workspace, month by month. Months follow the workspace time zone (Settings → Workspaces → Time zone).

Where the numbers come from

WhatsApp: Meta bills per delivered message, by category and destination market.

• When a message is sent, Desorix records an estimate from the rate table (Administration → Pricing).
• When Meta reports delivery, the webhook says whether the message was billable, and the confirmed cost replaces the estimate.
• The dashboard shows Confirmed by Meta and Estimated, not yet confirmed separately.

AI: every call's tokens are priced from Administration → AI → AI prices, in USD. Amounts too small to show at four decimals appear as "<$0.0001".

The dashboard

• Total this month, with a month-end forecast. The forecast is straight-line: spend so far ÷ days elapsed × days in the month.
• Tiles: WhatsApp confirmed, WhatsApp estimated, AI, and the forecast.
• AI auto-reply:
  • replies sent and conversations handed to the team;
  • both costs of those replies, AI tokens and WhatsApp messages;
  • their total, and the cost per reply.
• Breakdowns: by category, by number, by agent (their replies), by broadcast, by chatbot flow, and by automation rule.
• AI by feature: auto-reply, drafts, knowledge-base indexing and Try it, with calls and tokens.

The service-message allowance (from 1 October 2026)

From 1 October 2026:

• Service messages (free-form replies inside the 24-hour window, including AI auto-replies and chatbot messages) are charged. Each business phone number gets 1,000 delivered service messages free per calendar month.
• Utility templates sent inside an open window are charged too, with no free allowance.

Desorix counts delivered service messages per number per month from Meta's delivery webhooks, never at send time. Estimates are free while a number is under the allowance, and at the rate card after that.

• The allowance is set under Administration → Pricing → Free service messages per number per month (default 1,000).
• Billing month time zone (default UTC) decides which month a delivery counts in. Meta doesn't document which time zone it uses; change the setting if you learn otherwise.
• After an upgrade in the middle of a month, the current month is counted from past deliveries, service messages only.
• The dashboard's Free service messages section shows each number's used and remaining free messages for the month. Before 1 October 2026 it says when charging starts instead.
• The confirmed cost always follows Meta's billable flag, whatever the estimate said.

Broadcast confirmations take this into account: recipients inside Meta's 72-hour free entry point, and (before 1 October) recipients of utility templates with an open window, are shown as free and left out of the estimate.

Currencies

WhatsApp costs are in the pricing currency (Administration → Pricing, USD by default, as Meta's rate cards are). AI costs are always in USD.

• Pricing currency USD: totals are exact.
• Another currency: set Value of 1 USD in this currency under Administration → Pricing. Totals, AI alerts and spend limits then convert AI costs and are shown as ≈ approximate.
• No rate set: the two are shown side by side, and alerts or limits that need to add them are refused.

Cost alerts

Costs → New alert (owners and admins):

• What to watch: the total, WhatsApp (all categories or one category), or AI.
• Compare: spend so far, or the month-end forecast.
• Threshold: in the pricing currency.
• Email addresses: optional. Empty sends to the workspace's owners and admins.

Alerts are checked every hour (desorix:check-cost-alerts) and email at most once per alert per month. The list shows each alert's current value and when and to whom it was last sent. That's useful before email is set up: with MAIL_MAILER=log, the emails are written to storage/logs/laravel.log instead of being sent.

A hard stop for AI auto-reply is the monthly spend limit; see AI assistant.