respond.io pricing in 2026

respond.io lists three priced plans and one quoted plan: Starter at USD 99 a month, Growth at USD 199 and Advanced at USD 349. Billed yearly, the monthly equivalent drops to USD 79, USD 159 and USD 279, charged as USD 948, USD 1,908 and USD 3,348 a year. Enterprise has no public price.

The plans differ in more than size. Starter comes with unlimited monthly active contacts but five users; Growth and Advanced move to ten users and start at 1,000 monthly active contacts, the tier the page uses for its entry price.

A monthly active contact is a person the business talks to by chat or call during the billing month. An inbound message or call, or a conversation the business starts, makes that person active for the month. That definition comes from the same rate card, checked on July 28, 2026.

Four things add to the plan: extra users, blocks of monthly active contacts, extra AI credits, and Meta's WhatsApp charges. respond.io's pricing page says WhatsApp fees are not included in any subscription and that Meta charges them based on your usage.

An extra user costs USD 12 a month on Starter, USD 20 on Growth and USD 24 on Advanced. Each extra block of 100 monthly active contacts costs USD 12 on Growth and USD 15 on Advanced, and 1,000 extra AI credits cost USD 15. User and contact rates were checked on respond.io/pricing on July 28, 2026 and the credit rate on September 16, 2026; all three were still listed on September 24, 2026.

WhatsApp balance is topped up inside respond.io, from USD 10 to USD 2,000 per top-up, and Stripe charges a 5.5 percent fee on each one. If the balance runs short, the WhatsApp channel is suspended and stops sending messages, broadcasts and automations until you top it up. Those rules come from its help center, checked on July 28, 2026.

Meta charges by recipient country and message category, whatever provider you use. For recipients in Mexico, from October 1, 2026, a delivered marketing template costs USD 0.0397 and a utility or authentication template costs USD 0.0085, including utility templates inside the 24-hour window.

Service messages, meaning replies to a customer who wrote first, are free up to 1,000 delivered per phone number per month; above that allowance each costs USD 0.0085 in Mexico. Conversations that start from an ad that opens WhatsApp get a free entry point window: delivery costs nothing while it stays open. These figures come from Meta's official rate card, checked on September 17, 2026.

Budget the two numbers separately: the respond.io subscription, driven by users and contacts, and Meta usage, driven by how many templates you send and of which kind. A support team that mostly replies pays Meta little; a team that sends weekly campaigns pays considerably more.

respond.io is the better choice when a large team needs chats, calls and email in one inbox, with enterprise controls such as single sign-on, multiple workspaces and data masking, which its rate card includes from Advanced. Growth already carries AI Agents, workflows, Zapier, Make and the developer API.

It also fits a team that grows in people faster than in contacts: Growth and Advanced include ten users, and every extra seat has a published price. And respond.io offers a seven-day free trial with no credit card, per its page on September 24, 2026, which Eva does not offer today.

It fits less well if you buy in Mexico and need peso billing with a CFDI tax invoice: its Spanish rate card is in US dollars, and we found no MXN price, Mexican entity or tax-invoice commitment. The same goes for contact volume that swings between months, since extra blocks are billed at the end of the cycle.

respond.io charges by plan, users and active contacts to organize an inbox; Eva charges by plan with capacity included so the conversation itself completes sales tasks. Eva starts at $191 USD monthly on an annual plan or $229 USD month to month on Essential, with 5,000 credits and 5 users.

EvaAI publishes this page and sells Eva, so the comparison stays on verifiable ground. Eva is an AI agent that answers on WhatsApp and the other channels a business uses, queries the connected catalog, quotes with real prices, books appointments and follows up, with a CRM included.

Choose respond.io if the main purchase is a team inbox with calls, enterprise controls and a free trial. Choose Eva if you want the same conversation to query the catalog, quote, book and follow up. Meta's fees sit outside both; compare against a real month of conversations.