Respond.io Pricing 2026: The Real WhatsApp & DM Bill

Respond.io pricing in 2026 starts at $79/month for Starter, $159/month for Growth and $279/month for Advanced, but only when you pay for a full year upfront. Month to month, the same plans cost $99, $199 and $349. Enterprise is custom. On top of the plan you pay for extra contact tiers, extra seats, AI credits beyond your allowance and Meta's WhatsApp message fees, which are never included.

That gap between the headline and the invoice is what this page is about. If you are a coach, creator or small agency running inbound conversations on Instagram and WhatsApp, the plan name matters less than three numbers: how many people DM you each month, how many people answer those DMs, and how much WhatsApp traffic you send. We checked every figure below against respond.io/pricing, Respond.io's own pricing guide and its Billing & Usage help center on October 20, 2026, including the contact-tier price table the pricing calculator uses.

If you want the product verdict (features, pros, cons, user reviews), read our Respond.io review. This article is only about money: what each plan costs, what pushes the bill up, and what a realistic coaching business actually pays.

Respond.io Pricing Plans at a Glance (2026)

Respond.io sells four plans. Prices are in USD, and the pricing page defaults to the yearly toggle, which is why most roundups quote $79 as the starting price.

What each plan unlocks, in one line each:

• Starter: team and custom inboxes, the mobile app, AI Assist and AI prompts (tone, translate, spelling, chat summaries), basic reports, growth widgets (links and QR codes), contact import and data export. No broadcasts, no Workflows, no AI Agents, no Zapier, Make or n8n.
• Growth: everything in Starter plus broadcasts, the Workflow builder, AI Agents (receptionist, sales, support and custom agents), advanced reports, Zapier, Make and n8n, the developer API, Calendly, Cal.com and Google Calendar integrations, and the Meta click-to-chat ads trigger.
• Advanced: everything in Growth plus HTTP requests in Workflows and AI Agents, incoming and outgoing webhooks, AI voice agents for calls, custom channels, multiple workspaces, phone and email masking, single sign-on and the Salesforce integration.
• Enterprise: unlimited users, more workspaces and higher API rate limits.

Every plan connects the same channels: WhatsApp (Cloud API), Instagram, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, Viber, LINE, WeChat, email, website chat and VoIP calling. Channel access is not where the plans differ. Automation is.

Monthly vs Yearly: The $79 Is the Annual Price

The single most common misunderstanding about Respond.io pricing is the starting price. The pricing page opens on the yearly toggle ("Save up to 20%"), so the cards read $79, $159 and $279. Switch to monthly and they read $99, $199 and $349. Respond.io's own September 2026 pricing guide lists the monthly figures as the plan prices and describes the annual option as a 20% discount.

What that means in practice:

• Paying yearly is about 20% cheaper, but you pay it all upfront. Starter is $948 at checkout, Growth is $1,908 and Advanced is $3,348, before any contact tier or seat upgrades.
• Annual billing does not mean one invoice a year. Respond.io's help center is explicit: on an annual plan you get your subscription invoice once a year, plus a separate on-demand invoice in any month where you go over your contact or AI credit allowance.
• Seats cost more on monthly billing too. An extra Growth user is $20 a month on yearly billing and $25 a month on monthly billing (more on seats below).

For a coach testing a new channel, month to month is the safer choice even at the 20% premium. Lock in a year only once you know your real contact volume, because that volume, not the plan, is what drives the bill.

How Monthly Active Contacts Drive Your Respond.io Bill

Respond.io prices Growth and Advanced on Monthly Active Contacts (MACs): the number of unique people you exchange messages or calls with during a billing month. It does not matter how many contacts sit in your database or how many messages you trade with each one. Talk to the same lead 40 times in a month and they count once. Talk to 1,200 different people once each and you have 1,200 MACs.

The counting rules, straight from Respond.io's Billing & Usage documentation:

• A contact counts if they send or receive a message (or make or receive a call) during the billing month.
• Broadcasts are excluded. A contact who only receives a broadcast does not count.
• Failed outbound messages still count, except broadcasts. If you message someone and delivery fails, they are still a MAC.
• The counter resets at the start of every billing cycle.
• Admins get alerts at 90% and 100% of the allowance.

Starter is the exception: it includes unlimited Monthly Active Contacts. That is a genuine advantage, and it makes Starter the cheapest Respond.io plan at any volume, as long as you can live without automation.

Respond.io contact tier prices (Growth and Advanced)

Growth and Advanced start at 1,000 MACs. You can raise or lower the tier at any time without changing plans. These are the totals the pricing calculator shows for each tier, verified from the calculator's own price table:

Yearly figures are the per-month equivalent; multiply by 12 for the upfront annual charge. All prices exclude extra seats, AI credit overage and WhatsApp fees.

The shape of that table matters more than any single number. Going from 1,000 to 10,000 contacts on Growth multiplies your contact capacity by ten but your price by less than three. Respond.io rewards volume. The flip side is that a coach whose DMs spike during a launch pays for that spike, either through a higher tier or through on-demand charges.

What Happens When You Go Over Your Contact Limit

Respond.io does not cut you off. If you pass your MAC tier, MAC On-Demand keeps your inbox and automations running and bills the extra contacts at the end of the cycle, in blocks of 100:

• Growth: $12 per 100 extra contacts
• Advanced: $15 per 100 extra contacts

That arrives as a second invoice, separate from your subscription. Respond.io itself says on-demand contacts are meant for temporary, seasonal spikes, and that a permanent increase is cheaper as a higher tier. Here is where the break-even sits on Growth:

• Monthly billing: the 2,500 tier costs $100 more than the 1,000 tier. Eight on-demand blocks cost $96, nine cost $108. So once you regularly land above roughly 1,850 contacts, the 2,500 tier is cheaper.
• Yearly billing: the 2,500 tier adds $80 a month. Seven blocks cost $84, so the tier wins once you regularly pass about 1,700 contacts.
• Higher up: from 2,500 to 5,000 the logic repeats (about 850 contacts over your tier is the tipping point). From 5,000 to 10,000 the tier jump costs $160 a month on monthly billing, so on-demand stays cheaper until you are about 1,350 contacts over.

The practical rule from Respond.io's own guide is a good one: if you exceed your tier two months in a row, move up a tier instead of paying on-demand.

Why DM-heavy creators feel this more than support teams

A support desk talks to existing customers, whose volume is fairly stable. A coach on Instagram talks to strangers, and strangers arrive in waves. One Reel with a "comment GUIDE" call to action can put 800 new people in your inbox in a weekend. Every one of them who receives your automated DM becomes a Monthly Active Contact, whether they ever reply or not. The same pattern shows up in other contact-metered tools; our ManyChat pricing breakdown walks through how ManyChat's active-contact billing behaves after a viral post.

Respond.io User Seats: What Extra Users Cost

Seats are the second meter. Each plan includes a set number of users, and you can add or remove individual seats without changing plans.

For most coaches, seats are a non-issue: a solo coach, a part-time setter and an assistant fit comfortably inside 5 or 10 included users. Seats only start to matter for agencies running several client inboxes, or coaching businesses with a full setting team. If that is you, our guide to a WhatsApp CRM compares how team inboxes price their users.

AI Credits and AI Agents: What They Cost on Respond.io

Respond.io's AI features run on AI credits. AI Agents, AI Assist, AI prompts and AI summaries all draw from the same allowance:

• Starter: 5,000 credits, but only for AI Assist, prompts and summaries. AI Agents are not available on Starter.
• Growth: starts with 10,000 credits, and the allowance grows with your contact tier.
• Advanced: starts with 20,000 credits.
• Enterprise: starts with 40,000 credits.

Respond.io says AI usage is included at no extra cost on Growth and above, under a fair-use policy, and that 99% of businesses never exceed their credits. If you do, AI Credit On-Demand kicks in:

• Billed in blocks of 1,000 credits at $15 per block, rounded up (one extra credit is billed as a full block).
• Charged at the start of the next billing cycle, on the same on-demand invoice as extra contacts.
• Capped at 200% of your total allowance. When you hit the cap, AI features pause until the next cycle.
• Not available on trial accounts or legacy plans, where AI simply stops at the limit.

Respond.io does not publish how many credits a single AI Agent reply consumes, so you cannot convert credits into conversations from the pricing page alone. Use the trial (Growth features, 1,000 contacts) to watch the credit counter on your own traffic before committing.

What the AI Agents can actually do matters as much as what they cost. On Growth, an AI Agent can answer from your knowledge sources, collect and update contact details, tag and assign conversations, trigger Workflows and follow up when a chat goes idle. It understands Instagram Story replies, voice notes, images and ad context. Booking is the gap: the Calendly and Cal.com integrations let you share booking links and view meetings, while an AI Agent action that calls a scheduling platform directly (HTTP requests) is an Advanced feature.

Are WhatsApp and Instagram Fees Included?

No WhatsApp fees are included in any Respond.io plan. Meta charges them by usage, and you top up a WhatsApp balance inside Respond.io. The good news: Respond.io passes Meta's rates through with no per-message markup and no number connection fee, which not every inbox does. For contrast, see how markups stack up in our Wati pricing breakdown.

How Meta's WhatsApp fees work in October 2026:

• Incoming messages are free. A lead messaging you never costs anything.
• Templates are billed per delivered message (marketing, utility and authentication), at a rate that depends on the recipient's country. Meta moved to per-message billing on July 1, 2025.
• New since October 1, 2026: service messages (your free-form replies inside the 24-hour window) are free for the first 1,000 per phone number each month, then billed at the utility rate, and utility templates sent inside the window are now chargeable. Respond.io documents the change in its own WhatsApp pricing change post.
• Click-to-WhatsApp ads still open a free window: messages inside a Free Entry Point window stay free, up to 7 days for ad-started chats and 72 hours for Facebook Page button chats.

For the per-country template rates, read our WhatsApp Business API pricing guide, and apply the October 2026 service-message rule above on top of it.

Instagram and Messenger carry no Meta message fees. Meta does not charge per message or per API call for Instagram messaging, which our Instagram Messaging API explainer covers in detail. On Respond.io, an Instagram-only coach pays the plan and the contact tier, with no per-message fees on top. WhatsApp is where the variable cost lives, and it is usually worth it: across 828K AI DM conversations we analyzed, WhatsApp leads who replied qualified at 34%, roughly 1.9x the Instagram rate.

What Respond.io Really Costs a Coach: 3 Scenarios

Here is the math for three realistic coaching setups, using monthly billing (subtract about 20% for yearly) and excluding WhatsApp fees.

Scenario 1: Solo online coach, about 650 contacts a month

An online weight-loss coach gets around 500 new Instagram DMs a month from Reels and story replies, plus 150 WhatsApp conversations from a link in bio. One user. She wants an AI Agent to answer the first questions and share her Calendly link.

• Plan needed: Growth (AI Agents and the Calendly integration are not on Starter).
• Cost: $199 a month on monthly billing, or $1,908 upfront for the year.
• Plus: WhatsApp template fees for any follow-up sent after the 24-hour window, and service-message fees if she passes 1,000 replies a month on her number.

Starter would cost $99 and cover unlimited contacts, but every DM would be answered by a person: AI Assist can draft a reply, but nothing sends on its own without Workflows or AI Agents. For a solo coach, that defeats the point of the tool.

Scenario 2: Coach plus two setters, launch month at 2,200 contacts

A fitness coach runs a challenge launch. Contacts jump from 900 to 2,200 for one month. Three users.

• Stay on the 1,000 tier: $199 plus 12 blocks of 100 at $12, so $343 for that month, then back to $199.
• Move to the 2,500 tier: $299 for the month.
• Seats: three users fit inside Growth's 10 included users.

If the launch is a one-off, on-demand is fine and you avoid a permanent upgrade. If launches happen every month, the 2,500 tier saves money.

Scenario 3: Coaching business running ads, 6,000 contacts and 12 users

A nutrition coaching company spends on Instagram and click-to-WhatsApp ads, has 12 people in the inbox and averages 6,000 contacts a month.

• Growth at the 5,000 tier: $399, plus 10 on-demand blocks at $12 ($120), plus 2 extra seats at $25 ($50), so about $569 a month.
• Growth at the 10,000 tier: $559 plus $50 for seats, so about $609 a month.
• Yearly billing on the 5,000 tier brings the base to $319 a month and seats to $20 each.

At this size the numbers are reasonable for a full team inbox, and the free ad window makes click-to-WhatsApp traffic cheap. This is the kind of business Respond.io is built for.

The Free Trial and the Costs People Miss

Respond.io has no free plan. It offers a 7-day free trial with Growth features for 5 users and 1,000 contacts, minus broadcasts. A few trial details worth knowing:

• Topping up a WhatsApp balance requires a paid subscription, so plan any paid template tests for after you subscribe.
• When the trial ends, the organization is scheduled for deletion after 30 days, and the data cannot be recovered afterward.
• AI Credit On-Demand is not available during the trial; AI pauses at the limit.

Beyond the trial, these are the line items most pricing roundups skip:

1. The onboarding program is an add-on. The 28-day guided onboarding (up to 4 sessions) is listed as a paid add-on, and its price is not published.
2. Failed messages count. An outbound message that fails to deliver still makes that person a Monthly Active Contact.
3. Two invoices a month when you go over: one for the plan, one for on-demand contacts and AI credits.
4. Upgrades reset your billing cycle on the same day, with a pro-rated charge, and any contact overage at that moment is billed immediately.
5. Downgrades wait until the end of the current cycle.
6. Cancellation stops more than billing. During cancellation, incoming messages are no longer stored and Workflows stop running, and the organization is flagged for deletion after 30 days. Export your contacts and conversations first.
7. Unpaid invoices freeze the account after a 5-day grace period: incoming messages are still stored, but you cannot reply or run Workflows.

None of these are unusual for SaaS, but they add up for a solo operator who expected one flat monthly fee.

Respond.io Pricing vs Other DM and WhatsApp Inboxes

How Respond.io's billing model compares with the tools coaches usually shortlist. Prices are each vendor's published entry points as last verified in our own reviews; always confirm on the vendor's site.

Respond.io is not the cheapest entry point, but it is one of the few that combines every major channel, no WhatsApp markup and a contact meter that gets cheaper per contact as you grow. Our SleekFlow review, Kommo review and AiSensy review cover those tools' plans in more depth.

When a Coach Does Not Need an Omnichannel Suite

Respond.io genuinely wins in a few situations, and it is worth being clear about them:

• You run a team. Routing, assignment, collaborators, lifecycle stages and team reports are excellent once three or more people share an inbox.
• You sell on many channels. If WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok, email and calls all matter, one inbox with one contact record per person is worth real money.
• You need integrations. MCP on every plan, the developer API from Growth, and webhooks plus native CRM connections on Advanced make it a credible hub for a larger operation.
• You send a lot of WhatsApp. Zero markup on Meta's rates is a meaningful saving at volume.

Most solo coaches are not in that picture. Their DMs come from one or two channels, mostly Instagram, and the job is narrow: answer every inbound DM fast, ask the qualifying questions, handle the first objections, and get the right people onto a booked sales call. The close happens on that call, with the coach or a closer, not in the chat. Our guide to the appointment setter role explains that hand-off.

For that job, paying for a team inbox and then assembling the qualification logic in Workflows is a lot of overhead. A dedicated AI setter does the conversation itself: it replies in your voice on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, follows up when leads go quiet, qualifies against your criteria and drops the booking link at the right moment.

The billing model is different too. SetSmart bills per AI message, not per contact: each AI reply is one message, and WhatsApp templates count as half a message. The Pro plan is a free 7-day trial, then $97/month with 1,000 messages included, and Scale is $297/month with 4,000. Neither model is cheaper in every case. Contact billing tends to favor high volumes of short exchanges; message billing tends to favor fewer, deeper qualifying conversations that end in a booked call. Run your own last 30 days of DMs through both before you decide.

FAQ

How much is Respond.io per month?

Respond.io costs $99 a month for Starter, $199 for Growth and $349 for Advanced on monthly billing. Billed yearly, the same plans work out to about $79, $159 and $279 a month ($948, $1,908 and $3,348 a year). Enterprise is custom. Extra contact tiers, extra seats, AI credit overage and WhatsApp fees are added on top.

Does Respond.io have a free plan?

No. Respond.io has no free plan, only a 7-day free trial with Growth features for 5 users and 1,000 Monthly Active Contacts, excluding broadcasts. After the trial you must subscribe, or the organization is deleted 30 days later.

Are WhatsApp fees included in Respond.io pricing?

No. Meta's WhatsApp fees are billed separately by usage through a WhatsApp balance you top up in Respond.io. Respond.io passes Meta's rate through without a markup. Incoming messages are free, templates are billed per delivered message, and since October 1, 2026 service replies are free only for the first 1,000 per number each month.

Is Respond.io cheaper monthly or yearly?

Yearly is about 20% cheaper: Growth drops from $199 to roughly $159 a month and extra Growth seats from $25 to $20. The catch is that you pay the full year upfront, and you still receive monthly on-demand invoices if you exceed your contact or AI credit allowance.

What happens if I exceed my Monthly Active Contacts on Respond.io?

Nothing stops. Extra contacts are billed on demand in blocks of 100, at $12 per block on Growth and $15 on Advanced, on a separate invoice at the end of the cycle. Starter includes unlimited contacts, so it has no overage.

Does the Respond.io Starter plan include AI Agents?

No. Starter includes AI Assist, AI prompts and AI chat summaries with 5,000 AI credits, but AI Agents, Workflows and broadcasts start on Growth. If you want automated replies to Instagram or WhatsApp DMs on Respond.io, Growth is the minimum plan.