Meta & TikTok APIs: my castle is on someone else's land

From the first day I started Message24, one of my biggest worries was what happens when the platforms I depend on change their rules? what happens when they decide to enter the game and compete with their partners?

I didn’t have to wait long.

October 2025. Meta bans general-purpose AI assistants from the WhatsApp Business API. ChatGPT, Perplexity, anything where the AI itself is the product. New providers immediately, everyone already on the platform gets until January 15, 2026. Officially it was about server load and unintended use of the API. What those bots also happened to be was enormous volumes of traffic that fit none of Meta’s billing categories.

December 2025. The European Commission opens an investigation. Three weeks later Italy’s regulator skips ahead to a remedy and orders Meta to drop the ban. Meta drops it. In Italy.

February 2026. The Commission issues a Statement of Objections and says it intends to impose interim measures. Still no verdict.

July 1, 2026. Meta ships its own agent platform. Free for the first month.

August 1, 2026. The free month ends. Meta’s agent now bills $2 per million tokens, around 4 to 5 cents a reply.

October 1, 2026. Service messages start costing money. A service message is what you send when a customer writes to you first and you answer within 24 hours. Answering your own customer. It’s been free since November 2024, which is long enough for a lot of people to build a business on it. No volume discounts, and Meta can revise the rates every quarter.

In other news, TikTok now requires verification for businesses that want to use the Business Messaging API (an impossible feat for most shops/online retailers here in Iraq).

However, every business deals with outside risk and we dont run away at the first gunshot!