Where Does Your LINE Official Account Bill Actually Go?
The Complete Free-vs-Paid Map
Almost every company in Taiwan has a LINE Official Account, but ask a simple question, "of the messages you send out, which ones cost money and which don't?", and nine owners out of ten can't answer. That's not really your fault: LINE's billing rules are scattered across several documents, split unevenly between Chinese, English, and Japanese. We recently redid our own Official Account from scratch and, while we were at it, checked every one of these rules against the source. This piece turns that research into a single map. By the end you'll know three things: which messages are free, which plan to pick, and how to cut the bill.
Context: written for the Taiwan market; prices are in NTD (LINE Official Account plans and pricing differ by country).
One rule of thumb first: whoever speaks first, pays
The rules look complicated, but one principle covers about 80% of cases:
A conversation the customer starts: your reply is free.
A message you start, billed per recipient.
Why design it that way? Think about it from LINE's side and it clicks: a customer messages you first and you answer: that's service, and the platform is happy to host it. You message a large group first: that's marketing, and marketing gets billed. The entire pricing system is really just that one sentence, expanded. Let's unpack both sides.
The free tier: max out "the customer speaks first"
None of the following count against your monthly quota:
- Auto-responses and the auto-add welcome message: automated greetings and canned replies from your bot are free. (This specific line item currently only has a verbatim listing on LINE's Japanese-language official page, a single source, which we're flagging honestly.)
- Replies within one minute: when a customer messages you and the system replies through the reply mechanism within one minute, it's free, and one exchange can include up to five message bubbles. Note that this reply privilege is single-use and time-boxed to one minute, once it expires, it's gone.
- Manual typing in the back-office chat console: you or a staff member chatting one-on-one with a customer through LINE's dashboard is free, and we couldn't find a documented monthly cap anywhere.
You might think: so if we do everything through manual chat, it's free forever? In theory, yes, but there are anti-abuse limits: messaging more than 200 different chat rooms within an hour triggers a temporary restriction, and unverified accounts are capped at 200 messages a day to chat rooms that haven't replied to you in 7+ days. Normal business operations won't hit these; using it as a mass-messaging tool will.
There's a detail here that matters a lot for AI customer service: that one-minute window is automation's golden opportunity. AI replies instantly through the free channel; hand it off to a human who answers ten minutes later, and the reply privilege has already expired, now it can only go out as a billed, proactive message. Put differently, the moment you hand off to a human, the meter starts running (this is our own operational conclusion, derived from the rules, not official wording). Which gives you a design principle: don't split something you could finish in one message into two slow ones.
The paid tier: billed per head, and blocked users don't count
Anything you send proactively (broadcasts, targeted sends, all of it) is billed by the number of people who receive it: send to 5 people, that's 5 messages. Packed four bubbles into one send? Still counts as 5; bubbles don't get billed separately.
More importantly: a message sent to someone who has already blocked you isn't counted. LINE's official English documentation says this in plain language: "If you send a message to a user who blocked your LINE Official Account or a user ID that doesn't exist, the message isn't counted" (LINE Developers, Messaging API pricing). This one rule changes which dashboard number you should actually be watching, more on that next.
Three look-alike numbers on your dashboard. Only one is real.
LINE's dashboard shows three numbers that look similar, and most people watch the wrong one:
- Total follows: a lifetime cumulative count of everyone who has ever followed you, it never goes down, even after blocks or account deletions. This number only ever climbs; fine for bragging externally, useless for decisions.
- Targeted reach: people who currently haven't blocked or deleted you. This is the real denominator, the one your broadcasts actually reach, and the one you actually pay for.
- Blocked count: how many people currently have you blocked; it drops if someone unblocks you.
In one sentence: budget and performance are judged by "Targeted reach." "Total follows" is a keepsake.
Which plan to pick: start by calculating your "monthly send volume"
The three plans differ only in monthly message allowance (checked against the official page as of late July 2026; confirm current terms before you commit):
| Plan | Monthly fee | Free messages | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | NT$0 | 200 | Not available |
| Standard | NT$800 | 3,000 | Not available |
| Heavy | NT$1,200 | 6,000 | From NT$0.2/message |
The math is simple: targeted reach × monthly broadcasts = your volume. As a feel for scale: 1,500 targeted followers, one broadcast a week, lands around 6,000 messages a month, right at the threshold for the Heavy plan (this is our own illustrative estimate, not an official figure). Conversely, if you're still in the low hundreds of followers, the free plan is plenty, spend the budget on service quality first, not on upgrading tiers.
Three ways to save money, in this order
- Max out the free tier first: hand common questions to auto-responses and AI instant replies (within the one-minute window), so your paid quota is reserved for actual proactive marketing.
- Check "Targeted reach" before every broadcast: it's what determines the real cost of each send; consider lowering frequency to long-dormant lists, getting blocked doesn't cost you a message, but it does mean the message already annoyed someone.
- Segmenting? Build your own list: LINE's native segmentation has a high floor (audiences need a minimum of 50, attribute filters need 100+, and stats only retain 14 days), which makes it nearly unusable for a small account. Log engagement in your own system and target recipients through an uploaded list instead, no minimum size. Tracking-link clicks are allowed for measurement, but LINE's terms require that the tracking be identifiable or disclosed to the user.
The rules and pricing in this article were checked line-by-line against LINE's official documentation (developer docs, official terms, and official how-to pages, e.g. the dashboard metric definitions, in Chinese) as of late July 2026; rates and plans may change, so confirm current terms before signing anything. Two claims are explicitly flagged as single-source (the free welcome-message list appears only on LINE's Japanese page; "blocked messages aren't billed" is stated explicitly only in LINE's English documentation, which we cite directly above). "Billing starts at hand-off to a human" and the "1,500-follower monthly volume" example are our own derivation and illustration, not official wording.
Does the welcome message a new follower gets cost anything?
No. Both the auto-add welcome message and auto-responses fall under the free tier and don't count against your monthly quota. One caveat: this specific line item currently only appears verbatim on LINE's Japanese-language official page, a single source. It matches our own operating experience, but we're flagging the source honestly.
Does a broadcast sent to someone who already blocked us still cost a message?
No. LINE's official English documentation states it directly: a message sent to a user who has blocked your account, or to a user ID that no longer exists, isn't counted. Which means the number that actually determines your broadcast cost is your dashboard's "Targeted reach," not "Total follows."
Can we broadcast only to engaged customers and skip the cold ones?
You can, but don't expect LINE's native tools to do it well: click-based audiences need a minimum of 50 people, attribute-based filters need 100+, and the stats only retain 14 days, nearly unusable for a small account. The workable path is to build your own list: log engagement in your own system and target recipients via an uploaded list, which has no minimum size.
Want AI to catch your customers inside that one-minute window?
Our own Official Account runs exactly this way: AI answers instantly through the free channel, and only hands off to a human when it should. Tell us how your customer service works today and we'll help you work out how much you could save and how to wire it up.
Talk to us about your Official Account