Every Scale plan includes every feature of the platform, and the only difference between plans is how many messages each billing period includes. Every message stored in a conversation uses 1 message from the plan, whether it comes from the customer, from the AI assistant or from a team member. You follow your plan and usage under Settings → Billing & plan in the Scale dashboard.
This guide explains how usage is counted, how campaign messages are billed, exactly what happens when a plan expires or runs out, and how to renew, change or cancel a plan.
How Scale pricing works
No feature is locked behind a higher plan: the AI assistant, the inbox, lead management, campaigns, integrations and the store are available on every plan. What changes between plans is message volume only. The published plans are Launch, Growth, Scale and Pro, plus Enterprise, whose custom volume is agreed with the sales team. The message volume and current price of each plan are on the pricing page.
There is no fee per team member, and contacts and leads are never metered. Team members and workspaces are unlimited on every plan. Managing agents is covered in the team guide.
Monthly and annual billing compared
The pricing page has a toggle between Annual and Monthly. A monthly plan runs for one calendar month from the day it is activated, and an annual plan runs for one full calendar year. The annual offer, as the pricing page states it, is “Pay for 10 months, get 12”, and the actual saving appears as its own line in the order summary at checkout.
The message allowance of an annual plan is added in full when the plan is activated and stays valid for the whole year, so you use it at the pace your business needs. The pricing page may also show a temporary discount on a plan with a countdown, and the offer disappears on its own when it ends.
What the free trial includes
The free trial lasts 14 days and starts on your first workspace once you confirm your email address. It comes with a trial message allowance shown on the usage meter, and it is consumed exactly the way any plan is: 1 message per message. The status reads Free Trial with “Trial ends in” and the number of days, and the Upgrade plan button takes you to choose a paid plan.
Each email address gets one free trial. Workspaces you add later do not start with a trial: they can be set up completely without a subscription, then need a subscription of their own to switch on replies and messaging.
What counts as a message in Scale
| Message type | What it uses |
|---|---|
| Incoming message from a customer | 1 message |
| Reply from the AI assistant | 1 message |
| Manual reply from a team member or the owner | 1 message |
| Image, voice note or file | 1 message, exactly like a text message |
| Message sent through the API | 1 message |
| Campaign message | 1 message per recipient |
| Automatic store message, including the reply to a Confirm or Cancel order button | 1 message |
| Product photo or product card the assistant sends with its reply | 1 message per photo or card |
| Template test, including verification-code templates, or a test message from the Channels page | 1 message |
The rule is the same on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram: there are no multipliers by message type or channel, and no separate allowance for the assistant or for the API. All of these sources draw on one balance.
Every message Scale sends and Meta accepts is counted exactly once. A message Meta refuses is not counted, and retrying the same message never counts it twice. If your plan has nothing left the message is not sent at all, so the balance never goes below zero.
What does not count: internal notes between team members, timeline events such as a team member taking over a conversation or handing it back to the assistant, the number of contacts and leads, and the number of team members. Messages held while the service is stopped are charged only when they are released, as the section on a stopped service explains.
How campaign messages are billed
Campaign messages have two separate costs. The first is Meta’s official rate for WhatsApp template messages, which depends on the recipient’s country and the template category. Meta bills you for it directly, on the payment method of your own WhatsApp Business Account. Scale never collects Meta’s fee and adds nothing on top of it.
The second comes from your Scale plan: each campaign message sent uses 1 message per recipient, and it appears in the usage breakdown under Campaigns.
Before a launch, Scale checks that your WhatsApp Business Account has a payment method and warns you when it does not, and if Meta refuses a send on billing grounds the campaign stops immediately. Building campaigns is covered in the campaigns guide.
How to read the usage meter and alerts
| Item in Billing & plan | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Status pill next to your name | Active, Free Trial, Awaiting Payment, Suspended or Cancelled. |
| Current plan | The plan name, price and period, then “Renews in”, “Trial ends in” or “Access ends in” with the number of days. A workspace without a subscription shows No active plan. |
| Plan button | Choose a plan when there is none, Upgrade plan during the trial, and Change plan on a paid plan. |
| Usage this period | Messages used out of the period’s total allowance, with a progress bar and the number of messages remaining. The total includes top-up messages. |
| Usage breakdown | The period’s messages split into Dashboard, AI, Public API, Campaigns and Incoming. It is for display only, because they all draw on the same balance. |
| Top up messages | The top-up pack cards, each with an Add to plan button. |
| At a glance | The number of Team members in the workspace. |
| Alert | When it appears |
|---|---|
| Percentage next to Billing & plan in the Settings menu | When 70% or more of the allowance is used. |
| Close-to-limit note under the usage bar | When 90% or more is used, then a limit-reached note at 100%. |
| “Your messages are running low” notification | When 10% of the plan allowance or 20 messages remain, whichever is larger. Once per period. |
| “You have run out of messages” notification | The moment the first message is refused for lack of balance, at most once a day. |
| “Your Scale subscription is ending soon” notification | Seven days before the period ends, then again two days before. |
| “Your Scale subscription has expired” notification | When the period ends without a renewal. |
These notifications appear under the bell for the account owner, and their Manage subscription button opens the billing section. Expiry reminders may also reach the account owner by email.
How message top-up packs work
Top-up packs add messages to your balance without changing your plan. There are three sizes: 1,000 messages, 5,000 messages and 10,000 messages. You buy them from the Top up messages cards in Billing & plan or from the pricing page, and they are added to your balance as soon as the payment is confirmed.
Top-up messages are valid during your current plan period only: they do not expire while that period is running, but they expire when it ends and do not carry over to the next one. When messages are used, Scale takes from the balance that expires soonest first.
If you run out of messages while the plan is still running, a top-up restores the service at once. If the plan period itself has ended, a top-up does not bring it back, and the fix is to renew.
What happens when the plan expires or runs out
The service stops in three cases: the plan period ends, the message balance reaches zero, or the subscription is suspended. A banner appears at the top of the dashboard, for example “Your subscription has expired — the service is stopped” or “You have run out of messages — the service is stopped”, and the state is shown next to the workspace name in the sidebar: Expired, Out of messages or Suspended. This is what happens for as long as the service is stopped:
- The AI assistant stops replying on every channel.
- Manual replies from the inbox are refused, for the owner and for agents, with a message asking to renew the plan.
- Campaigns and follow-ups are paused.
- New customer messages are still received and stored on hold: they do not appear in the inbox, they are not charged, and they are not lost.
- The banner shows how many customer messages are waiting.
- Your customer receives no notice and no apology about the state of the subscription.
When you renew, or top up after running out of messages, the held messages are released together: they appear in the inbox and their conversations are marked unread. Each released message uses 1 message from the new balance, whether it is an incoming customer message or a reply you typed on your phone or in the Page inbox while the service was stopped. If more messages were held than the new balance covers, Scale charges only what the balance covers and still releases all of them.
A workspace that has never subscribed follows the same rule with a different banner: “This workspace is ready — it just needs activating” with an Activate Workspace button. All of its settings are saved and editable, and knowledge base files you uploaded are processed as soon as a subscription is activated.
How to renew or change your plan
Open the billing section
Go to Settings → Billing & plan. If your account has more than one workspace, first make sure you are inside the workspace you want to renew.
Click the plan button
Change plan, Upgrade plan or Choose a plan, or “Renew subscription now →” when the service is stopped. If your current period still has messages left, a confirmation states how many messages will expire.
Choose the plan and the billing period
On the pricing page choose Annual or Monthly, then the plan. The Enterprise plan takes you to the contact sales form instead.
Pay through InstaPay
Transfer the exact total in a single transaction to the InstaPay account shown on the checkout page, then enter the InstaPay number you sent from and upload a screenshot of the transfer receipt as PNG, JPG or PDF, up to 10 MB.
Wait for review and activation
The Scale team verifies the transfer manually and then activates the plan, and you get an email when it is active. The checkout page states that verification usually takes up to one hour during business hours, Sunday to Thursday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM (GMT+3), and the next business morning outside those hours.
Payment is a manual transfer, so a plan is not charged automatically: you renew it by completing a new checkout, and if the period ends without a renewal the plan expires. When you switch to a different plan, the new plan replaces the current one as soon as the payment is approved, and you are not charged for both. You cannot move from a paid plan back to the free trial.
If an order is left unfinished, the status reads Awaiting Payment with a button to complete the payment.
How to cancel a subscription
You can cancel at any time. To cancel, contact Scale support and name the workspace whose subscription you want to end; the Scale team cancels it for you.
Cancelling means the plan will not renew. It is not an immediate stop: the service and the balance stay as they are until the end of the paid period, and the status reads Cancelled with “Access ends in” and the number of days. After the period ends the plan is expired like any plan that was not renewed, and you can subscribe again at any time.
How billing works with several workspaces
Each workspace has its own subscription, plan, balance and invoices, so one workspace running out of messages never stops another workspace in the same account. The Billing & plan section shows the subscription of the workspace you have open and names it in the heading, and its View all subscriptions link opens the Workspace subscriptions page. That page is also in the sidebar, as Subscriptions, once the account has more than one workspace.
The Workspace subscriptions page shows, for each workspace, its name, subscription status, plan name, renewal date and messages left, buttons that take you to the pricing page to subscribe, upgrade or renew, and the most recent invoices with their date, amount and status. A deleted or archived workspace stays on the list only when it has past invoices.
Creating workspaces and switching between them is covered in the workspaces guide.
Payment methods invoices and gifts
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Payment method | The checkout page offers a transfer through InstaPay from any Egyptian bank app or wallet, with an uploaded transfer receipt and a manual review before activation. Top-up packs are paid the same way. |
| Invoices | Every approved payment is recorded as an invoice on the workspace it was paid for, and appears on the Workspace subscriptions page. Invoices are never edited or deleted. |
| Enterprise plan | It is not bought at checkout. Contact sales opens the contact form, and the team prepares a custom package with a checkout link of your own. |
| Active Gift Balance | A discount in EGP granted by the Scale team and taken off the cost of your next renewal at checkout. |
| “A gift is waiting for you!” | A gift that is ready to claim by clicking the card. It is either a discount added to the gift balance, or messages added to the workspace balance. |
| Gift in progress | A card showing how many renewals or months remain before the gift becomes available. |
Frequently asked questions about Scale plans
Do unused messages roll over to the next period?
No. The allowance of each Scale billing period ends with that period, and renewing or changing plan starts a new period with the new plan’s allowance only.
Do top-up messages expire?
They stay valid while your current plan period is running and expire when that period ends. They do not carry over to the next period and do not move with a plan change.
Are customer messages lost if I run out of messages?
No. Scale receives them and stores them on hold, and they appear in the inbox as soon as you renew or top up. Each released message uses 1 message from the new balance.
Does Scale collect Meta’s fee for campaign messages?
No. Meta bills you directly on the payment method of your own WhatsApp Business Account, and Scale adds nothing on top of its rate. On the Scale side, each campaign message uses 1 message from the plan per recipient.
Do I pay more when I add people to my team?
No. Scale plans are not priced per user, and only messages are counted. Team members are unlimited on every plan.
Why does my new workspace say it needs activating?
Because every Scale workspace has its own subscription. You can set up the new workspace completely without one, but AI replies, messaging and campaigns run only after a plan is activated for it.
Can I top up after my plan period has ended?
A top-up helps when you run out of messages while the plan is still running. If the plan period itself has ended, renew it first, because top-up messages belong to the running plan period.