Best Free Messaging Tools

1,000 free service messages (non-template replies inside the 24-hour customer service window) a month per business phone number, since 2026-10-01. Service messages after 1,000 and template messages are charged. Rates depend on message category and recipient country code. Note — 2026-10-01: Meta resumed charging for WhatsApp service messages on 2026-10-01. Each business phone number gets 1,000 free service messages a month, and Meta charges from the 1,001st at the recipient market's service rate. Service messages had been free without a monthly limit since 2024-11-01. The same day, Meta began charging for utility templates sent inside an open customer service window, at the recipient market's utility rate; they had been free since 2025-07-01. Source ↗

• If a Messaging account has no payment method, Meta delivers service messages within the free tier but does not deliver them after the free tier is used. (From developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/pricing, read 2026-10-11.)
• Utility templates sent inside an open customer service window were free before 2026-10-01. Since 2026-10-01, they are charged. (From developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/pricing, read 2026-10-11.)
• Click to WhatsApp ads: When a user messages from such an ad on Android or iOS and the business replies within the customer service window, Meta does not charge for that reply or for the business's marketing, utility, authentication and service messages to that user for up to 7 days. Meta Business Agent messages are still charged. (From developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/pricing, read 2026-10-11.)
• Meta's terms permit AI Providers to offer a general-purpose AI assistant only where Meta is legally required to allow it. Meta lists Brazil ($0.0625 per service message), the EU and EEA (no charge since 2026-05-13) and Türkiye (permitted since 2026-10-15, no charge). These are the only permitted locations; the United States is not one of them. A business using AI to answer its own customers pays normal rates. (From developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/pricing/ai-providers, read 2026-10-23.)
• WhatsApp does not currently deliver marketing template messages to users with United States phone numbers (+1 with a US area code). Sending a marketing template to a US number returns an error. Utility and authentication templates and service messages to US numbers are delivered and cost $0.0034 each. Service messages are free up to 1,000 a month per business phone number. The $0.025 North America marketing rate is charged on Canadian numbers. (From developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/templates/marketing-templates/per-user-limits, read 2026-10-18.)
• Meta may update pricing only on January 1, April 1, July 1 or October 1. The next possible change is 2027-01-01. (From developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/pricing, read 2026-10-11.)

Serverless message queue by Upstash — 1,000 messages/day, 10 active schedules, 7-day max delay, retries free. When we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-11-08, we could read no amount, tier or rate on the page, so we cannot confirm these terms today.

Send and receive text messages using your Android phone as an SMS Gateway. Free to send and receive up to 200 messages per month.

Notification infrastructure — 10K workflow runs/month, 20 workflows, 2 environments, 3 team members. All channels: email, in-app, SMS, chat, push

Notification infrastructure — 10,000 notifications/month, 500 guide active users, unlimited workflows/broadcasts/channels/team members. All delivery channels included

[NATS.io](https://nats.io) as a service — The Personal Plan is $0/month and includes 2 Accounts, 10 Connections, 2 Leaf Nodes, 1 MiB Message Size, 10 GiB Network Data, and 5 GiB Storage.

Push notification platform — Free $0/mo. Access to: All channels, Basic automation & analytics, OneSignal AI & MCP, Basic personalization. Mobile Push Notifications for organizations with up to 1,000 monthly active users. Web Push Notifications Max 10,000 subscribers per send. Email 10,000 sends / month. Note — 2026-09-01: OneSignal limited mobile push and in-app messaging on its Free plan to organizations with up to 1,000 monthly active users, from September 1, 2026 for new customers and October 1, 2026 for existing customers. Above the limit, mobile push and in-app messages pause until the account upgrades; web push and email keep working under the existing limits. Mobile push had been unlimited on Free. Source ↗

• Above 1,000 monthly active users, OneSignal pauses mobile push and in-app messages on the Free plan until the account upgrades; web push and email keep working under the Free plan's limits. (From onesignal.com/blog/whats-changing-on-onesignals-free-plan, read 2026-11-08.)

Send push notifications to your iOS and Android devices. Effortlessly integrate via API or Webhooks and maintain full control over your alerts. Free plan: 50 messages per day to 1 device and 1 application.

Every calendar month, the first 10 GiB of throughput identified as the Message Delivery Basic SKU for a billing account is free. After that, the price is $40 per TiB in all Google Cloud regions.

• Google Cloud's Free Tier requires a billing account. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)
• Usage beyond the Free Tier's monthly limits is billed at standard rates. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)

Realtime messaging service. Free for up to 20 simultaneous connections and 100,000 events/day

SuprSend is a notification infrastructure that streamlines your product notifications with an API-first approach. Create and deliver transactional, crons, and engagement notifications on multiple channels with a single notification API. In free plan you get 10,000 notifications per month, including different workflow nodes such as digests, batches, multi-channels, preferences, tenants, broadcasts and more.

Communication infrastructure in 5 minutes. Free tier includes: 100 SMS and calls, 3000 Emails, Push, Slack, MS Teams, WhatsApp, and more.

Lightweight message queue server with SQS-compatible interface. In-memory or file-backed persistence. REST and SQS query APIs. Open source (Apache-2.0). Runs as single JAR or Docker container. Ideal for local dev and testing without AWS dependencies. The page we cite for ElasticMQ names a plan but states no amount, so these limits come from our own record rather than from that page.

Webhook service for sending (Dispatch), receiving (Ingest) and data streaming (Stream). The Free plan is $0 with no credit card: up to 50,000 messages a month, 50 messages a second, 7-day payload retention and the embeddable webhooks UI. Basic, from $20 a month, adds a 99.9% uptime SLA, 200 messages a second and 30-day retention, and bills messages beyond 50,000 a month. Note — discovered 2026-09-27: Svix cut its Free plan from 200 to 50 messages a second and from 30-day to 7-day payload retention, and moved the 99.9% uptime SLA to a new Basic plan from $20 a month. Free's 50,000 messages a month, beyond which messages were billed, now reads "Up to 50k messages per month". The pricing page changed between the Internet Archive's 2026-09-14 capture and our read on 2026-09-27. Source ↗

SMS Gateway for Android™ enables sending and receiving SMS messages through your devices using cloud routing. Completely free cloud service (with recommended notification for usage above 10,000 messages/day to maintain quality for all users).

Message queues on Workers — Cloudflare Queues charges for the total number of operations against each of your queues during a given month. An operation is counted for each 64 KB of data that is written, read, or deleted. Workers Free includes 10,000 operations/day. Workers Paid includes 1,000,000 operations/month + $0.40/million operations. Message retention is 24 hours (non-configurable) on the free tier and 4 days default, configurable up to 14 days on the paid tier.

Scalable and secure serverless MQTT broker you can get in seconds. It includes 1 million session minutes, 1 GB of traffic, and 1 million rule actions each month free forever. The free tier supports up to 1,000 connections. A session minute is counted for every minute a client is connected, including disconnected clients with persistent sessions. No credit card is required. Pay as you go pricing is $2.00 per additional million session minutes, $0.15 per GB for traffic, and $0.25 per additional million rule actions.

Managed RabbitMQ. The free Little Lemur plan runs on a shared RabbitMQ broker with a 1M message quota a month, 20 connections, 100 queues, up to 10,000 queued messages and a 28-day maximum idle queue time.

Real-time messaging — 200K messages/day, 100 concurrent connections free

Up to 500 monthly active users (MAUs) for $0 on the Free package, with every Ably product (Pub/Sub, Chat, Spaces, LiveObjects, LiveSync and AI Transport), community and email support and no commitment. Ably has priced on MAUs since November 5, 2026. Accounts already on its resource-based pricing keep their terms. Pro costs $29 a month and Business $349 a month for 1,000 MAUs, billed annually, and on both each MAU over the allowance costs $0.05. Note — 2026-11-05: On November 5, 2026, Ably moved to pricing on monthly active users (MAUs). The Free package now has a cap of 500 MAUs a month, which the free plan did not have before. It still allows 6M messages a month and 500 messages a second, and its concurrent connections rose from 200 to 500. Paid plans are now Pro and Business, from $29 and $349 a month for 1,000 MAUs billed annually. Accounts already on Ably's resource-based pricing keep their terms. Source ↗

• Besides 500 MAUs a month, Ably's docs give the Free package 6,000,000 messages a month, 500 concurrent connections and 500 concurrent channels. No credit card is needed, and the package has no time limit. (From ably.com/docs/platform/pricing/free, read 2026-11-09.)