Short answer: respond.io publishes US dollar prices on a Monthly Active Contact model: $79, $159 and $279 a month at the 1,000-contact tier, rising to $79, $449 and $789 at 10,000. Seats cost extra above 5 or 10 users. It adds no markup to Meta’s message fees. For Indian B2B teams the question is whether per-contact billing fits how you actually sell.
What respond.io charges, as published today
| Monthly Active Contacts | Starter | Growth | Advanced | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $79 | $159 | $279 | Custom |
| 2,500 | $79 | $239 | $419 | Custom |
| 5,000 | $79 | $319 | $569 | Custom |
| 10,000 | $79 | $449 | $789 | Custom |
| Over 10,000 | $79 | Talk to sales | Talk to sales | Custom |
| Contact allowance | Unlimited | Starts with 1,000 | Starts with 1,000 | Custom |
| Users included | 5 | 10 | 10 | Unlimited |
| Additional user | $12/mo | $20/mo | $24/mo | — |
| AI credits | 5,000 | From 10,000 | From 20,000 | From 40,000 |
These are the figures on respond.io/pricing read on 3 October 2026. The page carries the note “*Prices are in USD”, and its contact-volume selector changes the Growth and Advanced prices but never Starter’s.
The Monthly Active Contact model is the whole decision
respond.io’s pricing guide defines the unit plainly: “A Monthly Active Contact is a contact who sends or receives a message (excluding broadcasts) during the billing month.” The broadcast exclusion matters more than it looks — a blast to 50,000 consumes no MACs, but everyone who replies does.
Three published mechanics follow:
- Starter’s contact allowance is listed as unlimited; Growth and Advanced both read “Starts with 1,000”.
- Above your allowance you are “billed on-demand for additional usage in increments of 100 Monthly Active Contacts”: $12 per 100 on Growth, $15 per 100 on Advanced.
- Overages are “capped at 2× your plan’s included allowance”, and respond.io calls them “intended for temporary, seasonal spikes”.
Run that against the tier ladder and the window where overage beats the next tier up is narrow. On Growth, 6,000 active contacts costs $319 plus ten increments at $12, or $439, against $449 for the 10,000 tier — they meet at about 6,083 contacts. On Advanced the crossover is near 6,467. Past those points the tier is cheaper and brings headroom, and the marginal price of that headroom falls as you climb: on Growth, $53.33 per extra 1,000 contacts from 1,000 to 2,500, then $32.00, then $26.00.
Where respond.io is genuinely stronger
On several points this is not a close call.
It adds nothing to Meta’s message fees. respond.io states it applies no “markups on WhatsApp messaging fees like other providers do, so businesses know they’ll only pay the fixed Meta messaging fees”. Most Indian WhatsApp platforms publish per-message rates above Meta’s list, and at volume that difference compounds in a way a platform fee does not.
Channel breadth. The integrations page lists WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, Viber, LINE, WeChat and TikTok Business Messaging (Beta), plus email, the WhatsApp Business Calling API and VoIP calls. Few Indian platforms cover that spread.
Seats are not rationed on the cheap plan. Starter includes 5 users, Growth and Advanced 10, with extra users at $12, $20 and $24 a month. A real cost, but a published one — several competitors cap seats without selling more.
Automation plumbing. Workflows, a developer API, n8n, Zapier and Make, a Model Context Protocol server, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Zendesk. If your sales team lives in a CRM, this is the part that decides the project.
Where it fits Indian B2B teams badly
Billing is in US dollars. The pricing page says so explicitly, so your platform cost moves with the rupee, and nothing published there states Indian GST treatment or INR invoicing. If your finance team needs a rupee invoice, ask before you commit — we could not verify it either way.
Indian SMS and voice are not first-party. SMS appears only through Twilio, MessageBird and Vonage. There is no Indian aggregator among the listed channels, and no IVR, outbound voice broadcast or 1600-series calling. For a team whose follow-up is a phone call — most Indian B2B sales — that work happens elsewhere, and the DLT and header obligations sit with whichever aggregator you bolt on.
Per-contact pricing suits high-value conversations, not wide funnels. Indian B2B lead lists are often large and reply rates modest, and you pay for everyone who replies — deal or opt-out request alike.
Two published price lists, side by side
| respond.io | Interakt | |
|---|---|---|
| Currency | USD (“*Prices are in USD”) | INR, “+taxes” |
| Billing unit | Monthly Active Contacts | Flat plan fee |
| Entry plan | Starter $79/mo | Starter ₹3,499/qtr |
| Mid plan | Growth $159–$449/mo by tier | Growth ₹2,799/mo or ₹7,699/qtr |
| Upper plan | Advanced $279–$789/mo by tier | Advanced ₹3,799/mo or ₹10,499/qtr |
| Agents / users | 5 or 10 included, then $12–$24 each | Unlimited agents on all tiers |
| Per-message markup | States none; Meta’s fees only | Publishes own rates, e.g. Growth ₹0.958 marketing, ₹0.150 utility |
| Indian SMS / IVR / voice | SMS via Twilio, MessageBird, Vonage; no IVR or voice broadcast | Not offered on these plans |
Interakt is the closest Indian comparison most readers have in mind, so here are both sets of published figures, read the same day. We are not explaining the gap — these are different units, and you should check both pages yourself.
The structural contrast survives any price change. respond.io charges for contacts and for seats above the included count, and nothing per message. Interakt charges a flat fee with unlimited agents and publishes per-message rates of its own. Which wins depends on your ratio of agents to conversations to messages.
A worked example in rupees
Take a mid-sized Indian B2B team: 12 people in the shared inbox, about 6,000 contacts sending or receiving a message in a month. Converted at the European Central Bank reference rate of ₹96.33 to the dollar, dated 1 October 2026.
On Growth at the 10,000-contact tier: $449 plus two extra users at $20 is $489 a month, or ₹47,105.37 — ₹5,65,264.44 a year. The 5,000 tier plus overage comes to $479, or ₹46,142.07, saving ₹963 and buying no headroom.
On Advanced at the same tier: $789 plus two users at $24 is $837 a month, or ₹80,628.21 — ₹33,522.84 a month more than Growth, or ₹4,02,274.08 a year, for integrations, multiple workspaces and the security features.
Starter is the outlier. With unlimited contacts and 12 users it comes to $79 plus seven seats at $12, or $163 a month — ₹15,701.79. Growth at the 10,000-contact tier costs exactly three times that, and the published difference is features and seats, not contact volume, because Starter’s allowance has no ceiling.
Per active contact, Growth at 10,000 works out at ₹7.85 a month if 6,000 are active, or ₹4.71 at the full allowance. Meta’s fees sit on top, identical whichever platform you pick.
How to choose
Pick respond.io if your conversations are high-value, your channel mix goes well beyond WhatsApp, your volume makes a per-message markup elsewhere painful, and a dollar invoice is no problem. Look elsewhere if your follow-up runs on calls and Indian SMS, if you need rupee billing, or if you have many agents and a wide, cheap funnel rather than a narrow, expensive one.
Disclosure: XReach51 sells WhatsApp, SMS, voice and IVR survey tools for the Indian market, so we compete with respond.io. We publish competitors’ figures as they publish them, dated and sourced, and we do not quote our own rates in comparison posts — our pricing page is for that.
FAQ
Does respond.io add a markup to WhatsApp message fees?
Its own pages say no. The integrations page states there are “No setup fees or markups; pay only what Meta charges”, and the pricing guide says businesses “only pay Meta’s WhatsApp message fees”. Read 3 October 2026. Worth confirming in writing — it is a published claim, not a contract term.
What counts as a Monthly Active Contact?
A contact who sends or receives a message, excluding broadcasts, during the billing month. A broadcast to a large list consumes no MACs; replies to it do.
What happens if I go over my contact allowance?
Service continues. You are billed in increments of 100 contacts at cycle end — $12 per 100 on Growth, $15 on Advanced — capped at twice your included allowance.
Can I pay respond.io in rupees?
We could not establish this from a published page on 3 October 2026; the pricing page states only that prices are in USD. Ask their sales team, and ask about GST treatment and invoicing at the same time.
Does respond.io handle Indian SMS, IVR or voice broadcast?
SMS runs through Twilio, MessageBird or Vonage rather than an Indian aggregator, and the listed voice capability is the WhatsApp Business Calling API and VoIP calls. No IVR survey or outbound voice broadcast appears among the published channels. See IVR survey costs in India and bulk voice call pricing for that side of the stack.
Verification note and sources
Every figure above was read on 3 October 2026 and should be re-checked before you act on it. Two things we could not verify, named rather than estimated:
- Meta’s published India INR rate card. The rate table on whatsappbusiness.com loads from an endpoint that rejected every request we made on both 2 and 3 October 2026, so we quote no Meta per-message rupee rates here and have reused none from earlier posts. Since respond.io adds no markup, the Meta fee is the same whichever provider you choose — but the all-in cost per message is not computed here.
- respond.io’s monthly versus annual price. The page shows per-month figures of $79, $159 and $279 beside yearly totals of $948, $1,908 and $3,348, against struck-through figures of $1,188, $2,388 and $4,188. Each per-month figure times twelve equals the discounted yearly total exactly, and each struck-through total divided by twelve gives a round $99, $199 and $349. The monthly/yearly toggle changed no displayed figure when we exercised it. We report what the page shows without asserting which applies to month-to-month billing. Confirm before budgeting.
Primary sources, all read 3 October 2026:
- respond.io pricing page — plan prices, contact-tier selector, seat counts and additional-user prices, AI credits, the “*Prices are in USD” note, 7-day trial.
- respond.io pricing guide (respond.io/blog/respondio-pricing) — MAC definition, overage rates, the 2× cap, the no-markup statement.
- respond.io integrations page — channel list, the no-markup and no-setup-fee statement.
- interakt.shop/pricing — quarterly ₹3,499, ₹7,699 and ₹10,499 (+taxes), monthly Growth ₹2,799 and Advanced ₹3,799, unlimited agents on all tiers, per-message rates for Indian numbers.
- European Central Bank reference rate for 1 October 2026, ₹96.33 to the US dollar.
Related reading: WhatsApp Business API pricing in India, SMS vs WhatsApp vs voice cost, Wati alternative and AiSensy alternative.