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Gupshup
Conversational messaging and CPaaS with a flat platform fee stacked on top of Meta per-message rates
As of 31 August 2026, Gupshup starts at $0.001/message. An Indian CPaaS routing WhatsApp, RCS, SMS and voice at scale. Softwr lists it under Communication. Gupshup is available on Web, API.
Overview
What Gupshup does
Gupshup is a conversational messaging platform and CPaaS covering WhatsApp Business API, RCS, SMS, voice, and chatbot building. It provides message routing and delivery, template management and approval, a bot builder, campaign tooling for marketing sends, and agent-assist inboxes for teams handling inbound conversations. It is one of the larger WhatsApp Business Solution Providers by volume, particularly in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The pricing structure is the thing to understand before shortlisting. Gupshup charges a platform fee of roughly 0.001 US dollars per outgoing template message and per session message in each direction, plus about 0.0001 dollars per second on voice. Sitting underneath that is Meta charging, which moved from the old per twenty-four-hour conversation model to per message billing in July 2025, at rates that vary sharply by destination country and message category. So the Gupshup fee is a rounding error and the Meta pass-through is the bill. That matters commercially because it means the choice between WhatsApp providers is rarely about per message price. It is about deliverability, template approval speed, support responsiveness and how much of your effective rate is hidden in bundled minimums. Gupshup competes on scale and reach into emerging markets rather than on unit economics.
What people use it for
- An e-commerce brand sending order and delivery notifications over WhatsApp to customers across India and Southeast Asia
- A bank or fintech running one-time passcodes and transactional alerts with fallback from WhatsApp to SMS
- A company deploying a WhatsApp chatbot for tier one support with handover to human agents for anything it cannot resolve
- A marketing team running WhatsApp template campaigns to opted-in lists in markets where email engagement is low
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Gupshup.
- The Gupshup platform fee of about 0.001 dollars per message is negligible next to Meta pass-through rates, so comparing providers on their own fee is misleading, and the country and category mix of your traffic determines almost the entire bill.
- Gupshup publishes no single flat rate for a full send, so accurate cost modelling requires you to build a country by country and category by category forecast before any provider comparison is meaningful.
- Meta moved from conversation-based to per message billing in July 2025, which materially changed the economics of high-frequency messaging, and any budget or ROI model built on the old conversation pricing is now wrong.
- Template approval sits with Meta rather than Gupshup, so rejections and category reclassifications can stall a campaign regardless of provider, and support quality on chasing them is a common complaint.
- The product surface is broad, spanning CPaaS APIs, bot building and campaign tooling, and the non-API tools are less refined than dedicated conversational marketing platforms, so many buyers use Gupshup purely as a pipe.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Gupshup
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- GupshupvsVonage
Vonage: Comparable CPaaS breadth with stronger presence in Europe and North America
- GupshupvsSendGrid
SendGrid: If your requirement is actually high-volume transactional email rather than messaging
Pricing
What Gupshup costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Messaging
$0.001 /message
- About 0.001 USD Gupshup platform fee per outgoing template message
- Same fee on outgoing and incoming session messages
- Meta per-message charges passed through on top, varying by country and category
- Voice charged at around 0.0001 USD per second
- Meta retired per 24-hour conversation billing in July 2025 and Gupshup followed
- Enterprise volume agreements negotiated separately
Capabilities
Features
WhatsApp Business API
Official BSP access with template submission and approval management
Flat platform fee
About 0.001 USD per template and per session message, in each direction
RCS messaging
Rich Android messaging with cards and carousels
SMS and voice
Global SMS routing and voice at roughly 0.0001 USD per second
Bot Studio
Chatbot builder for automated conversation flows
Agent inbox
Human handover for conversations a bot cannot complete
Campaign manager
Bulk template campaigns with audience segmentation
Emerging market reach
Strong carrier and operator relationships across India, SEA, MEA and LATAM
Two-way conversations
Inbound session handling within the messaging window
APIs and SDKs
REST APIs for sending, receiving and status callbacks
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What does Gupshup charge?
About 0.001 USD per outgoing template message and per session message in each direction, plus roughly 0.0001 USD per second on voice. Meta per-message charges are passed through on top.
Is Gupshup cheaper than other WhatsApp providers?
On its own platform fee it is competitive, but that fee is a small fraction of the total. Meta pass-through rates dominate, so provider choice rarely changes your bill much.
Did WhatsApp pricing change?
Yes. Meta retired per 24-hour conversation pricing on 1 July 2025 and moved to per message billing, and Gupshup followed.
Is it only for India?
No, but its strongest carrier and operator reach is in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
Keep looking
Where to go from Gupshup
- Gupshup alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Gupshup pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Gupshup badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Communication softwareThe full category
- Best Communication softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Communication software for
Compare Gupshup with
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- Quo
- Rocket.Chat
- Sessions
- LINE WORKS
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Gupshup, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Gupshup
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Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
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