WhatsApp Calling for Indian businesses: what customers see, what it costs, what you need first

Farhan Shaikh runs a nine-person pest-control business in Hyderabad. Half his customers don’t want to type. They want to describe the scratching noise in the ceiling, and they want to do it now. For years that meant the office landline, a technician’s personal mobile, and a notebook of missed calls that someone was meant to return.

WhatsApp Calling on the Business Platform moves those calls onto the number customers already message. It’s worth doing, but it has rules that decide who pays, who can call whom, and whether your number qualifies at all.

What the customer sees

On a number with calling switched on, the customer sees a call icon in your chat and on your business profile. They tap it and it rings like any WhatsApp call. Meta supports calls from the customer’s phone app, on Android or iPhone. WhatsApp on a desktop won’t place these calls.

You control when that icon works. Meta lets the business set calling hours and holiday closures, so a customer at 11 pm doesn’t ring an empty office. If a call does come in, the business has roughly 30 to 60 seconds to accept it before WhatsApp ends it and shows the customer “Not answered”.

You can also hand customers a way to call. A call button can sit inside a message or an approved template, and Meta supports a call link in the form wa.me/call/ followed by your number, which you can put on your website, a visiting card or a QR code on the service van. Desktop WhatsApp doesn’t open call links either, so print them where people will be holding a phone.

Calls from customers are free

Meta doesn’t charge for calls a customer makes to your business. The call is free to you however long it runs.

There’s a useful side effect. When a customer calls you, the 24-hour customer service window opens or refreshes, whether or not anyone answers. So after a missed call you can reply in the chat without an approved template: “Sorry we missed you, can we call you back at 4?” That reply is a service message. Since 1 October 2026, service messages beyond 1,000 per number per month cost ₹0.115 each in India, before GST, so a missed-call follow-up isn’t free once you’re past the allowance. It’s still far cheaper than losing the job.

Calls you make are billed

Business-initiated calls are where Meta charges. Its pricing page sets the charge by three things:

• the length of the call, counted in six-second pulses and rounded up, so a 56-second call is 10 pulses;
• the country code of the number you call;
• a volume tier based on how many minutes you’ve called in that calendar month, with the same tier accrual as messaging.

Meta publishes the rates as downloadable rate cards, including one in rupees. We haven’t quoted an India per-minute figure here because the rate cards change on quarter starts and third-party pages quote figures we couldn’t match to Meta’s own card. Open the INR card from Meta’s calling pricing page before you budget, and check the date on it.

Two smaller charges catch people out. The message that asks a customer for permission to call is priced like any other message, so a permission request sent as a template outside the window costs a template, and one sent inside the window counts as a service message. And the bill goes to the payment method on your WhatsApp account, not to your software provider.

You need permission before you call

WhatsApp doesn’t let a business ring a customer cold. First you send a call permission request, and the customer chooses:

The customer taps	What you get
Allow calls	Permission that lasts until they revoke it in your business profile
Temporarily allow calls	Permission for 7 days (168 hours) from when they tapped
Nothing, or decline	No permission

Meta limits how often you can ask. Per customer, you can send one permission request in 24 hours and two in 7 days. Those counters reset after any connected call between you.

Permission can also be lost. After two unanswered calls in a row, WhatsApp asks the customer whether they still want your calls. After four, an approved permission is revoked automatically. Meta also caps connected calls at 100 per customer in 24 hours, which no small business will reach, but a dialler that retries every ten minutes will burn through the unanswered limit in an afternoon.

If you switch on Meta’s callback setting, a customer who calls you gives you temporary permission to call back, without a separate request. For a business that misses calls during site visits, this is the setting that matters most.

Our advice: ask for permission inside a conversation where the call is obviously useful (“Shall our technician call you to confirm the address?”), not as a standalone template to your whole list. You get two asks a week. Spend them where a yes is likely.

What you need before switching it on

Calling isn’t available on every number. Meta’s requirements that matter to a small business:

• The number must be on the WhatsApp Business Platform (Cloud API). The free WhatsApp Business app takes ordinary calls on the phone it runs on, but not the Platform features in this guide, such as permission requests and call links routed to your provider.
• Your messaging limit must be at least 2,000 unique people a day. New accounts start at 250. Business verification is the usual way up; our messaging limits guide covers the steps.
• Meta requires a valid payment method before a number can place calls. Add it to your WhatsApp account in Meta Business Manager, under your own business, so Meta bills you directly.

India is supported for business-initiated calling. Meta’s exclusions are the US, Canada, Egypt, Vietnam and Nigeria.

Once calling is live, decide who answers. A customer’s call has to be picked up by a person at a screen within that 30 to 60 second window, so a single receptionist with a headset is a single point of failure.

Recording and voicemail

Recording is optional and chosen per call. When a call is recorded, WhatsApp plays a spoken announcement to both people before recording starts, stating the purpose you gave. There’s no silent recording.

Meta keeps the recording available for your software to download for 7 days, then deletes it. Your provider decides how long it keeps its own copy after that, so ask. Check Meta’s pages for whether recording carries a charge before you turn it on for every call; for most small teams, recording only complaint and quotation calls is plenty.

Meta also offers voicemail. If a customer can’t get through, they can leave a message that plays inside the chat, so the voicemail sits next to the conversation rather than in a separate inbox.

A sensible first month

Start with inbound only. Put the call link on your website and your Google Business Profile, set calling hours that match the office, and make sure at least two people can answer. Watch the missed calls for two weeks. If more than a handful go unreturned, fix the staffing before you add outbound.

Then add outbound for one use: calling back customers who called you. With the callback setting on, you won’t need a permission request at all for most of them, and you won’t spend your two asks a week on customers who’ve already shown they want to talk.

For Farhan’s team, the test is simple: at close of day, how many calls from customers did nobody pick up or return? Before WhatsApp Calling, nobody knew. Now it’s a number on a screen, and it should be zero.