Viber Bot Pricing: A Guide to Viber Business Pricing [Feb 2024]

Viber Chatbot (Viber Bot) pricing has gone through major changes in recent times. If you currently use Viber for business or are planning to, you’re probably wondering how these changes will affect your business. Read on to learn about Viber business pricing, terms and use cases.

Viber Bot Pricing: How Does it Work?

Viber Chatbots are commonly used as Viber business accounts. Bots allow businesses to connect with subscribed customers for marketing, sales and support purposes.

In the past, businesses could send any number of messages for free. Unlike other messaging apps, Viber didn’t have a messaging window, so the lack of restrictions made it an attractive option for businesses. This is no longer the case. Let’s look at the new Viber Chatbot Commercial Terms.

Viber Chatbot Commercial Terms

Creating a chatbot on Viber comes at no cost, but each chatbot incurs a monthly maintenance charge of EUR 100. Chatbots created before February 5th, 2024, will continue to function under the old Commercial Model until Viber announces any changes.

Most importantly, the new Viber Commercial Terms fundamentally affect the way Viber conversations are priced. Next, we’ll share with you what costs to expect when chatting with customers on Viber.

How the Viber Chatbot Notification-Based Model Works

Viber Chatbots operate under a notification-based model, separated into Welcome messages, Chatbot-session messages and Chatbot-initiated messages. Let’s go through them.

Image showing the two categories of Viber bot pricing. Viber business pricing is separated into Chatbot Session Messages and Chatbot-initiated messages. — Viber Business Pricing: The new Viber bot pricing model separates chatbot messages into three categories

Welcome messages can be sent to users as soon as they open the conversation before subscribing to the Bot. Businesses often use this message to introduce their Bot and encourage users to subscribe to it. Welcome messages are free.

Chatbot Session messages are part of a customer-initiated conversation, and they are always free. Once a customer initiates a conversation, you can send unlimited replies for free within 24 hours of their first message. Messages sent after the 24-hour session are considered chatbot-initiated.

Chatbot-initiated messages are messages sent from a chatbot to a subscriber that is not part of an active messaging session. Chatbot-initiated messages come with a fee that varies according to the recipient's location, which is determined by the country code of their phone number.

Now that you know how the new Viber Chatbot pricing system works, let’s look at a few common use cases for Viber Chatbots and how the new pricing affects them.

Viber Bot Pricing: Use Cases

In this section, we’ll cover the following Viber use cases: Welcome messages, customer support messages and bulk promotional messages.

Viber Bot Pricing: Welcome Messages

Welcome messages are a one-time, automatic greeting to new subscribers to your chatbot. These are completely free. You can use a welcome message for general greetings, to provide new subscriber offers or to ask questions to qualify leads.

image with three icons showing types of welcome messages for Viber chatbots. You can send a general greeting, make new subscriber offers and ask questions to capture leads. — Use the one-time welcome message to encourage subscribers to engage with your business

Since welcome messages are free, make the most of them to get a conversation going. Encourage subscribers to message you so they’ll start a messaging session. This will help keep your messaging costs down.

Viber Bot Pricing: Customer Support Messages

If your business mainly uses Viber for customer support, there’s a good chance that most of your messages will be inside a messaging session. If the customer initiates the conversation, your replies are free for the next 24 hours.

This is a good incentive for support agents to respond to and resolve issues quickly. If an agent takes more than 24 hours to get back to the customer and the session expires, the next message will be Chatbot-initiated with costs involved.

Viber Bot Pricing: Bulk Promotional Messages

Large businesses that frequently broadcast promotional messages to thousands of customers may be the most impacted by this pricing model, as promotional messages fall into the chatbot-initiated message category.

That’s all you need to know about Viber pricing. If you want to message your customers using a Viber Bot account, make sure to have the best AI customer conversation management software. Try respond.io for free today!