Meta announced on Wednesday that it will pay developers for running WhatsApp chatbots in regions where regulators have forced the company to allow them. The move comes after the company’s ban on third-party chatbots on WhatsApp took effect on January 15.

Currently, Meta will charge developers in Italy, where the country The competition watchdog asked the company to suspend its policy in December. The company says the new pricing for non-template responses will begin on February 16. Meta plans to charge $0.0691/ €0.0572 / £0.0498 per message to developers for AI responses. This can result in high fees for developers when users exchange thousands of questions with AI chatbots every day.

Earlier this month, Meta sent notices to developers creating an exception for Italian phone numbers and allowing AI chatbots to serve customers. At the time, the company did not mention any plans to charge developers.

Currently, WhatsApp charges companies to use its API for various template responses to customers, which include use cases such as marketing, utility, or authentication. This includes messages users receive regarding payment reminders and shipping updates.

“Where we are legally required to provide AI chatbots through the WhatsApp business API, we introduce pricing for companies that choose to use our platform to provide services,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. It could also set a precedent for other geographies when Meta should step in and allow developers to operate their chatbots.

Meta first announced last October that it will block all third-party AI chatbots from using WhatsApp through its WhatsApp Business API.

Meta says its systems are not designed to handle responses from AI bots and are straightforward.

“The emergence of AI chatbots in our Business API puts a strain on our systems that they were not designed to support. This logic assumes that WhatsApp is a de facto app store. The market route for AI companies is the app stores themselves, their websites, and industry partnerships; not the WhatsApp Business Platform,” the company said at the time.

Since then, different regions, including the EUItaly, and Brazil, started anticompetitive probes. Brazil’s keeper at first asked Meta to suspend the policy. However, a court in Brazil sided with Meta last week and reversed the preliminary order blocking the new policy. As a result, the company asked developers not to provide their AI chatbots to users in Brazil, TechCrunch has learned.

Since the policy has started, developers are forced to send a pre-defined message to users of their AI chatbot on WhatsApp to redirect them to their site or app. Providers such as OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft announced last year that their WhatsApp bots will not work after January 15, encouraging users to access them on other platforms.