Wati alternatives for Indian travel and event businesses
Wati sells a WhatsApp Business API inbox: ₹2,999 a month for Growth with three users and one channel, ₹6,499 for Pro, ₹18,499 for Business, plus per-message charges on top. If you bought it to answer support tickets, it is the right tool. If you bought it because enquiries were going cold in your DMs and you needed to chase them, you are paying inbox prices for a sales problem, and a cheaper inbox does not fix it. What replaces it is a booking record that carries the trip, the seat and the balance the enquiry was about.
Wati is a WhatsApp Business API provider with a shared team inbox, chatbots and broadcast campaigns. If you are a tour operator, trek company or event organiser who signed up because enquiries were getting lost, you are paying a per-seat inbox subscription to do a job that is really about bookings.
What Wati publishes, as of today
Read off Wati's pricing page with the INR view selected, on 19 September 2026.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth | ₹2,999 | ₹2,199 | 3 users included, no additional users |
| Pro | ₹6,499 | ₹4,899 | 5 users, extra at ₹1,299 per user per month |
| Business | ₹18,499 | ₹14,799 | 5 users, extra at ₹2,199 per user per month |
There is also a pay-as-you-go option: ₹999 one time, described as "One time fee, no recurring subscription", which returns ₹999 as message credits good for up to 500 messages, with an account validity of three months. A seven-day free trial is advertised on all plans, and the billing toggle offers quarterly at up to 10% off and annual at up to 25%.
Every plan card carries the same line: "Additional charges apply for messages", with rates that "vary for marketing, utility & authentication". The subscription is the floor you pay before any message is sent.
Three things worth checking before you renew
The rate card is from November 2024, and it is priced per conversation
Wati's plan cards charge "per message" and link a "View Rate Card". That link does not go to a page on wati.io. It goes to a PDF headed "Cost per conversation in INR - Updated 1 Nov 2024", which prices India at ₹0.94152 for marketing and ₹0.138 for utility and authentication. Per conversation and per message are different billing models, and Meta repriced messaging after that date. Both of the help-centre articles Wati links about conversation-based pricing now return HTTP 410 Gone.
Growth is one channel, not several
The Growth card advertises an "Omnichannel inbox: Whatsapp Messages, Whatsapp Business Calling, Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, widget, wa.me" and, three lines down, "Connect any 1 Channel". So Instagram on Growth is instead of WhatsApp, not alongside it. Wati's own documentation goes further and says the multi-channel Team Inbox is "available only on the Pro and Business plans". The two vendor pages disagree. If Instagram plus WhatsApp in one place is the reason you are buying, price it at Pro, which is ₹6,499 a month.
The seat add-on price depends on which page you read
The INR view shows extra users at ₹1,299 on Pro and ₹2,199 on Business. The same page's HTML carries $24 and $69 for those fields. Those are not the same number at any exchange rate anyone has seen. Get the seat price on your quote.
How operators do this today
| How it works today | Where it breaks | What Thrivia does instead |
|---|---|---|
| Enquiries arrive in a shared WhatsApp inbox and the team answers them in turn. | An inbox is organised by conversation, so a trip with eleven half-decided enquiries is eleven threads and no list. Nobody can tell you the value of the pipeline for the March batch. | An enquiry is a lead attached to a trip and a departure, so the question "who has not paid for March" has one answer instead of eleven threads. |
| Follow-ups are chased by hand, or by a broadcast to everyone at once. | The first is a person's memory and the second annoys the people who already paid. | A campaign is a sequence of up to ten steps against a filtered slice of your own leads, each step timed from enrolment or from the previous step, and sent inside a window you set. |
| The message bill is a separate line from the subscription, at a rate published on a PDF. | You cannot reconcile a campaign's cost until the invoice arrives, if then. | Before you activate, the panel shows the projected cost at India's marketing rate and how many days the send will take at your Meta messaging tier. What you are billed against afterwards is the delivery receipts, not the estimate. |
| Somebody replies STOP and the team is supposed to notice. | They do not always notice, and Meta's quality rating is the thing that notices instead. | A STOP is recorded once and immediately exits every sequence that person is in and cancels every message already queued for them. The sender checks again before each send, so a STOP that lands after a message is queued still stops it. It is not a filter a campaign can be configured around. |
| The inbox handles product support: order status, returns, complaints, at volume, across a team of agents. | Nothing breaks. This is what Wati is built for, and it is genuinely good at it. | Nothing. Thrivia has no shared support inbox, no agent routing and no ticketing. If your WhatsApp volume is customer support rather than sales enquiries, buy an inbox and keep it. |
What Thrivia is instead
Thrivia is a booking platform with the lead chase built into it. Trips and events, seats and batches, deposits and balances, and a lead record that knows which of those a person was asking about. WhatsApp campaigns sit on top of that, sending Meta-approved templates to a filtered slice of the leads already in your CRM: the people who enquired, plus anything you imported yourself. There is no way to message outside that pool.
Campaign sending is part of the AI DM add-on rather than the base plan. The WhatsApp Business API guide covers what the API actually requires of you, and the tour operators page covers the enquiry-to-booking path end to end.
Who should stay on Wati
Stay if WhatsApp is your support channel and the work is volume: several agents, assignment rules, canned replies, ticket-shaped conversations that open and close all day. Stay if you are running ecommerce on WhatsApp, with catalogues and order status. Stay if you already have a chatbot built there that works.
Move if the conversations are pre-sales, if the thing you keep losing is a booking rather than a ticket, and if the reason you opened the inbox this morning was to find out who still owes you a balance.
Common questions
How much does Wati cost in India?
On 19 September 2026 Wati's pricing page in the INR view lists Growth at ₹2,999 a month, Pro at ₹6,499 and Business at ₹18,499, falling to ₹2,199, ₹4,899 and ₹14,799 on annual billing. There is also a ₹999 one-time pay-as-you-go option that returns ₹999 in message credits, good for about 500 messages over three months. Per-message charges apply on top of every plan.
Does Wati charge per message on top of the subscription?
Yes. Every plan card states that additional charges apply for messages and that rates vary by marketing, utility and authentication category. The rate card Wati links is a PDF headed Cost per conversation in INR, updated 1 November 2024, which prices India at ₹0.94152 for marketing and ₹0.138 for utility and authentication.
Can I use Instagram and WhatsApp together on Wati's Growth plan?
Wati's Growth card lists an omnichannel inbox including Instagram but also states Connect any 1 Channel, and Wati's own documentation says the multi-channel Team Inbox is available only on the Pro and Business plans. The two vendor pages disagree, so confirm it in writing before buying Growth for that reason.
Is Thrivia a replacement for Wati?
Only for the sales half. Thrivia has no shared support inbox, no agent assignment and no ticketing. It replaces Wati for an operator whose WhatsApp work is chasing enquiries into bookings, and does not replace it for a team doing customer support at volume.
Does Wati publish a minimum contract term?
No minimum-term or cancellation wording appears on Wati's pricing page as read on 19 September 2026. That is an absence on the page rather than a published guarantee, so ask for the contract term in writing rather than assuming either answer.