Pricing and allowances

Try the Messaging API in the sandbox or on the free plan before connecting real customers. Plans cap how many people your apps talk with on each channel, not how many messages you send. Paid plans is the short version: each plan, its price and how to buy it.

Plans

Plan	Price	Senders	People per channel
Free	$0	Flow’s shared senders, through the free trial	25 (a free trial of 25 people per channel)
Shared	$25 a month	Flow’s shared senders, including the shared iMessage line, and your own bot or number	300 a month and 200 a day
Dedicated	$100 a month	An iMessage line of your own, plus Flow’s shared senders	1,000 a day on its own line (a new line starts at 250 a day and ramps to 1,000 over its first 14 days), no monthly cap; 300 a month and 200 a day on Flow’s shared senders

• Free starts on its own: your first sign-in at flow.engineer (the dashboard), or the first key you make there, starts your account’s free trial, once. The Flow CLI (npx @flow-engineer/flow setup) starts the same trial. The trial opens Flow’s shared senders, the shared iMessage line included, to every app of the account, in test and live mode. People join an app by sending its join message.
• Shared and Dedicated are bought in the dashboard: Settings, then Usage and billing, then Choose a plan. Payment is monthly, by card, through Dodo Payments, which is the merchant of record and sends the invoices and handles sales tax. The workspace’s owner buys, and the plan covers every app of the account. A paid plan replaces the trial’s and the sandbox allowance’s limits for every app of the account, and an account that had the free trial keeps the shared iMessage line. People held when the trial ran out are let in, with their kept messages in order, a few minutes after the payment.
• Dedicated lines are reviewed by Flow before ordering, usually within a day; until then the account has the Shared limits. The line is then set up for you and is usually live within a few hours; the dashboard shows each step. If we can’t approve it, you’re refunded: bought directly, your Dedicated payment is refunded and you move to Shared ($25 a month); upgraded from Shared, the upgrade is refunded and you stay on Shared.
• SMS/RCS fallback is included on every iMessage line: Flow’s shared line (on the free trial and Shared) and Dedicated’s own line alike. A message to someone not on iMessage goes by SMS or RCS from the same number (see iMessage). Dedicated also includes call forwarding: phone calls to the line’s number are forwarded to a phone you choose.
• Outbound, $40 a month, the one add-on, for Dedicated only: your agent may message people first, people who haven’t written to the line yet. Without it, a line only replies to people who wrote first. Its own pacing is separate from the line’s daily limit of different people: a line starts 2 new conversations a day and grows to 40 a day over its first 21 days.
• Plans and the add-on are monthly, with no setup fee.
• Change or cancel your plan in the dashboard’s Manage billing (Dodo’s customer portal). A cancelled plan runs to the end of the month paid for, then the account goes back to the free plan’s limits.

Who counts

• A person counts once in each window, with their first message on that channel, one-to-one or in a group chat, over all the account’s apps and both modes. Group members who never write do not count, and neither do calls or simulated contacts.
• Your own sends count toward the daily limit of different people: everyone your apps send to on a channel in a day, by reply or by writing first, is one of that day’s different people. Replying again to someone already counted adds no one new, and your app can send only to people who have a place (see Past a limit).
• A Dedicated line’s 1,000 a day is reached over its first 14 days: a new line starts at 250 different people a day and ramps up evenly.
• Limits are counted per account and channel, by UTC calendar day and month. People on Flow’s shared senders and on your own senders are counted apart.
• GET /v0/app shows the caps that apply now and what is used, in the account’s people; the dashboard’s Usage card shows the same. The numbers are settings and may change, so read them there.

Past a limit

A new person past a limit is held: their messages are kept but not delivered to your app, the dashboard shows them as held. Sends to a held person answer 403 permission, channel_code sandbox_contact_limit on the free trial and plan_people_limit on a paid plan. They are let in, with their kept messages in order, once a place frees: when the day or month rolls over (the free plan’s total never does), when you delete a contact (DELETE /v0/contacts/{contact_id}), or when the plan or its limits change. On the free trial a held person’s messages are kept for 30 days. People who already have a place keep it. In a group chat, a held writer’s messages are kept the same way and never hold up the others’: the rest of the group’s messages still arrive, and the held writer’s arrive in the group once they are let in.

Sandbox allowance

Apps without the free trial or a paid plan, such as an app made with POST /v0/sandbox/keys and claimed later, use the sandbox allowance, on the Telegram sandbox bot:

	Without an account	Signed in
Contacts	1	3
Outbound messages	50 total	100 per contact
Key expiry	7 days	No expiry
Shared allowance	Per anonymous app	Across the person’s apps

Only outbound messages count. Keys and sign-in explains claiming an app and reading its remaining allowance.

Before going live

Use a live key, and a dedicated sender when customers should see your own bot, number or line. Check your plan and what is used on the dashboard’s Usage card (Settings → Usage and billing), or in GET /v0/app, before sending customer traffic.

With your own WhatsApp Business Account, Meta bills its messaging fees directly to your business. If you use a Flow-provided sender, confirm how channel fees apply to that sender.

Self-hosting an agent does not self-host the Messaging API. The framework is open source; Flow Messaging remains a hosted service.

Go live

Connect the sender and verify delivery with a live key.