Bot replies, AI replies and Meta's fees

The bot answers buyers on WhatsApp when you cannot. This guide explains the two caps on what it sends, the reply budget you control, and what Meta itself charges for those replies from 1 October.

Two caps: bot replies and AI-written replies

A bot replyis any message the bot sends to a buyer for you: a greeting, the menu, a product card, a payment link, an answer to a question. Messages you or a teammate type by hand never count, and a buyer’s own messages never count.

Some of those bot replies are written by AI(a conversational answer in the buyer’s own words) rather than picked from the standard menu. AI-written replies are a sub-set of bot replies, and each plan caps both:

• Free: 300 bot replies a month, 50 written by AI
• Growth: 1,000 bot replies a month, 200 written by AI
• Scale: 3,000 bot replies a month, all of them can be written by AI

Both caps run over a rolling 30-day window (or since your current billing period began, whichever is shorter), so they refill continuously rather than resetting on the first of the month. Upgrading raises them straight away. See Plans and pricing.

What happens at each cap

• AI-written cap reached: the bot stops writing conversational replies and falls back to the standard guided menu. Buyers can still browse, track an order, and reach you. Nothing goes quiet.
• Bot reply cap reached: the bot stops sending altogether and flags every new chat for you (it lands in Needs you). Every WhatsApp message still arrives in your inbox and you can reply by hand as much as you like. You also get one notification when this happens.

Your reply budget

On top of the plan cap, you can set your own monthly reply budget in My bot, Reply budget. The bot respects the smaller of the two. Leave it blank to use the plan cap. Why would you set a lower number? Because of Meta’s fees, below.

What Meta charges

From 1 October, Meta charges your business about ₦14 for each reply after 1,000 free replies a month per WhatsApp number. Because you connect your own WhatsApp Business account, that bill goes to your Meta business, not to Buvvo. Buvvo never adds a per-message charge on top.

• Growth’s 1,000bot replies sit exactly inside Meta’s free allowance, so a Growth shop that only uses the bot pays Meta nothing.
• Scale’s 3,000 would cost about ₦28,000 a month at Meta if you used all of them. That is what the reply budget is for.
• Replies you type by hand count toward Meta’s 1,000 too, but not toward your Buvvo caps.

Languages: Pidgin and Nigerian English

The bot is purpose-built for Nigerian English and Pidgin. That is what it is tuned for and what it handles most naturally. You can also select Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa in My bot; those rely on the underlying model’s general multilingual ability and are not specially tuned the way English and Pidgin are, so results can vary.

On Scale you can also set a custom AI tone and default language for the bot.