Vera Market is a fictional online retailer. They sell household goods, they ship across Chile and Mexico, and they run both their order notifications and their customer support on WhatsApp. Every number in this guide comes from their traffic.
How they use WhatsApp
Two separate jobs, which is typical, and Meta bills them differently.
Order updates. Every order triggers three template messages: order confirmed, order shipped, order delivered. These go out whether or not the customer is currently talking to them, so they must be templates.
Support. Roughly three in ten orders lead to the customer replying with a question: where is my package, can I change the address, I want to return this. A support agent, or an automated agent, answers back and forth until the issue is resolved.
The numbers
| Input | Volume |
|---|---|
| Orders per month | 50,000 |
| Utility templates per order | 3 |
| Utility templates per month | 150,000 |
| Orders that open a support conversation | 30% |
| Support conversations per month | 15,000 |
| Outbound replies per conversation | 8 |
| Service messages per month | 120,000 |
| Total outbound per month | 270,000 |
Their recipients are concentrated in two countries, which keeps the country-rate arithmetic manageable while still being realistic, since almost nobody sends to exactly one market.
Free today, billed in October
Of Vera Market's 270,000 outbound messages a month, 150,000 are billed today and 120,000 are free. That free 120,000 is 44% of everything they send.
On October 1, 2026, that 44% stops being free. Chapter 2.2 works out what it costs them.
The next section picks that up: what happens to Vera Market's bill if Meta reclassifies their shipping notification as marketing.