You don't need Meta's final rate card to size this. Your own message history already shows most of it, and the rate is the last thing you multiply by.
The method
- Take the last 30 days of outbound messages. A full month smooths out weekday and campaign effects.
- Keep only the ones that were free. These are your service messages: free-form replies sent inside the window. In status-webhook terms, the ones that came back as
free_customer_service. - Bucket them by recipient country. Rates differ per market, so a single total will mislead you.
- Multiply each bucket by that market's rate and add them up.
Steps 1 to 3 you can do today, and they're the ones that take the time. Step 4 is a multiplication, and the calculator below does it at today's rates.
Counting from the right source
Count from status webhooks, not from send calls; Chapter 1.3 covers why. A send log tells you how many messages went out; only the status data tells you which of them were free, which is the population you're trying to isolate.
If you've kept the raw pricing payloads, the filter is straightforward: select outbound messages whose pricing type was free_customer_service, group by destination country, count. If you haven't kept them, the approximation is: outbound, free-form, sent while a window was open.
Put a number on it
Enter the volumes from step 3 and pick your markets.
Prefilled with Vera Market's 120,000 service messages a month, split 70/30 between Chile and Mexico. Replace the markets and volumes with your own. Meta has not published service rates yet, so this multiplies by each market's utility rate, which the chapter argues is the closest available proxy. It's an estimate, not a quote.
Vera Market's exposure
| Message type | Per month | Today | From Oct 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Utility templates | 150,000 | Billed | Billed |
| Service replies | 120,000 | Free | Billed |
| Total outbound | 270,000 | n/a | n/a |
The headline
44% of Vera Market's outbound volume moves from free to paid.
And because service doesn't tier, its share of their cost lands higher than its share of their volume, so the real figure starts at 44% and goes up.
What to do with the number
Two things. First, tell whoever owns the budget, in September, not in October. Second, use the country breakdown to decide where to act: if 80% of your service exposure sits in one market, that's where the work in the next chapter pays off.