Zoko Pricing Explained
Learn about the 3 types of payments on Zoko and the associated additional fees
There are 3 types of charges that you will be paying every month for Zoko
- A platform subscription fee based on the plan you select
- A Zoko fee for each conversation
- A WhatsApp fee for each conversation
So if you are on the Team Plan, you will be charged a subscription fee of $54.99, Zoko’s usage fee of $0.010 per conversation and WhatsApp’s usage fee which is based on your customer’s location. For example, for an Indian customer, WhatsApp’s usage fee will be $0.0066 for business initiated conversation and $0.004 for user initiated conversation.
DEFINING CONVERSATIONS:
A conversation starts when the first business message is delivered, either initiated by the business or in reply to a user message. Businesses and users can exchange any number of messages, including template messages, within a 24 hour conversation session without incurring additional charges. Each 24 hour conversation session results in a single charge. Remember WhatsApp’s charges are based on the location of the user you are chatting with and this location is determined by WhatsApp based on the country code.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BUSINESS INITIATED AND USER INITIATED:
A conversation that initiates in response to a user message is an user initiated conversation. Whenever a business replies to a user within the 24 hour customer service window, that message will be associated with a user-initiated conversation. Businesses can send free-form messages within this 24 hour customer service window.
A conversation that initiates from a business sending a user a message outside the 24 hour customer service window is a business initiated conversation. A business initiated conversation can only start with a template message.
EXAMPLE
To understand this better, let us look at a few examples of business initiated and user initiated conversations
In this scenario, customer messaged the business at 1:09PM and the business responded at 3:30PM. Hence, the 24hours conversation window starts from 3:30PM, that is when the message by the business was delivered. This conversation is considered as user initiated as the business’s message was in response to a user message received within 24hours.
Now let’s have a look at a business initiated conversation
As you can see here, the business initiated a conversation with the customer with a template message and hence this will be considered as a business initiated conversation.
This document has a few more scenarios mentioned to help you differentiate between a user initiated and a business initiated conversation. Hence we recommend you to go through this document using the link shown on top.
SAMPLE BILLING
To understand Zoko’s billing correctly, let’s calculate the billing for a business on the Team Plan and having conversations with 1000 users in India.
- The subscription fees will be $54.99
- For 1000 conversations, Zoko’s conversation fees will be $10.
- Let’s assume these 1000 conversations had an equal mix of business initiated and customer initiated conversations. In India fee for a business initiated conversation is $0.0066 and for a user initiated conversation is $0.0040. Hence the whatsapp fees will be $5.3. According to WhatsApp’s policies, the first 1,000 conversations each month are free and hence the WhatsApp fees of $5.3 gets waived off.
- Hence the final billing amount will be $64.99
Similarly for a business chatting with customers in Germany, the only difference in billing would be WhatsApp’s per conversation fees which are $0.1365 for a business initiated and $0.0819 for a user initiated message.
