Viber 101: branded messages where Viber is the everyday app

Viber is a messaging and calling app owned by Rakuten, the Japanese internet group. In the countries where it is part of daily life, businesses use it to send branded messages to customers' phone numbers, to run chatbots people subscribe to, and to keep a business profile people can find and message. This primer explains how each of those works, what it costs, and where Viber is worth the effort.

Viber is an OTT app: messages travel over the internet, not through a mobile operator's SMS network. Rakuten Viber runs the app and sets the rules for business messaging; most businesses reach it through one of Viber's official messaging partners.¹⁶¹²

Business Messages

Business Messages are messages a company sends to a customer's phone number, inside Viber, from a verified sender that carries a blue tick.⁸ A business applies for the service through one of Viber's official partners, which provide the connection and the sender setup; standard bot messages, by contrast, address users by a Viber user ID rather than a phone number.¹²¹⁶ Viber describes the service as secure two-way communication between brands and consumers: a customer can reply.²³

Viber's rate card separates two families of message: one-time password and transactional messages, such as a code or a delivery update, and promotional messages.¹⁵ Since November 2024 Viber has offered dedicated verification messages for one-time passwords (OTP), with ready-made templates, a button to copy the code and a delivery time limit the business sets.⁸

Chatbots

A Viber chatbot is an automated account. The business creates it, receives a secret key (an authentication token) and registers a webhook, an address Viber calls with events such as a new message, a subscription, an unsubscription, a delivery and a "seen" notice.¹³¹² The webhook must use HTTPS with a certificate Viber trusts.¹²

When a subscriber writes to the bot, a 24-hour session opens; messages inside the session are not billed. Messages the bot sends outside a session are "chatbot-initiated" and are billed.¹⁴ Since 5 February 2024, new Viber bots can only be created on commercial terms.¹²

Business accounts

Since October 2023 Rakuten Viber has offered small and micro businesses a free, self-serve business account: a profile people can find, with a business inbox for answering customers.⁶ Customers find businesses through Viber's directory and can stop receiving their messages at any time.²²

What the customer sees

On the customer's phone, a Business Message arrives in its own chat under the business's name, marked with the blue tick that shows a verified sender.⁸ An OTP can be copied from a button in the chat without retyping it.⁸ The customer can reply in the same chat,²³ and can block the business at any stage; Viber can disable senders whose messages are blocked unusually often.²²¹⁷ That last point is worth remembering: on Viber, an unwanted message costs more than one customer, because a high block rate can cost the sender its access.

Viber launched on 2 December 2010, first as a free calling app for the iPhone.¹ In February 2014 Rakuten announced it would buy Viber Media for US$900 million; at the time Viber reported about 280 million registered users and more than 100 million monthly active users.² The deal completed in March 2014.³

Rakuten says Viber was the first messaging app to offer business messaging, which it dates to about 2015, nine years before its January 2024 announcement.⁷ In November 2016 Viber launched Public Accounts, which let brands be found without being saved as a contact and opened the app to third-party bots.⁴ In February 2019 Viber announced plans to charge businesses to operate chatbots, a change TechCrunch called controversial.⁵

Recent years brought tools for smaller firms and new message types: the free business toolkit in October 2023,⁶ business calls in January 2024,⁷ the current chatbot commercial model from 5 February 2024,¹⁴ and verification messages for OTPs in November 2024.⁸ In December 2024 Russia's communications regulator blocked Viber.²⁰

Viber's reach is concentrated. Rakuten does not publish a recent global active-user figure in the sources we could check; the 2014 numbers above are historical.² What Rakuten does publish is market by market:

• Europe. Rakuten describes Viber as Ukraine's most widely adopted messaging app, installed on 98% of mobile phones there (January 2024).⁹ Ukraine, Bulgaria and Poland were among the first countries to receive Viber's AI chat summaries in April 2024, alongside the US, the Philippines and Japan.¹¹ Viber's business rate card prices messages country by country, including Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Ukraine.¹⁵ In Russia, the regulator blocked the app in December 2024.²⁰
• Asia-Pacific. Rakuten describes Viber as the leading messaging app in the Philippines, where it opened a Manila office in October 2024.¹⁰
• Middle East, Africa and the Americas. We found no market-level figures from Rakuten Viber for these regions; check your own customers before assuming reach.

The pattern matters more than any single number: in a handful of countries Viber is the everyday messenger, and in most others it is a secondary app. The useful question is which of your countries fall into the first group.

• Verification codes: OTPs delivered inside Viber, often with SMS as the fallback. See OTP.
• Transactional updates: deliveries, bookings, payments and account alerts with images and buttons. See notifications.
• Promotions: offers to customers who opted in, labelled as marketing. See marketing.
• Support and chatbots: a bot or a business inbox answering questions, with replies free inside a 24-hour session.¹⁴ See support and chatbots.
• Sensitive documents: Rakuten's "SecurePlus" option checks whether a recipient's number has been flagged for possible fraud before delivering details such as bank statements; it was first built for a bank, Eurobank.⁸

Viber charges for business messaging in two separate models.

Business Messages: per message. Rakuten Viber publishes a rate card with a price per message for each country, split between OTP and transactional messages on one side and promotional messages on the other.¹⁵ A rule on the card matters for any business that sends across borders: domestic rates apply only when the sending entity is headquartered in the same country as the recipient; every other message is charged at international rates.¹⁵ Partners resell the service and add their own fees.¹⁶ Rakuten positions verification messages as cheaper than SMS, but the comparison depends on the country and the SMS price you pay.⁸

Chatbots: a monthly fee plus bot-initiated messages. Under the model in force since 5 February 2024, a bot owner pays a maintenance fee of €115 per bot per month, unless a signed agreement says otherwise, and pays for each delivered chatbot-initiated message; the welcome message is excluded, and messages inside a 24-hour session are included in the fee.¹⁴ The price of a chatbot-initiated message depends on the country code of the subscriber's phone number.¹⁴ Bots created before that date stay on the previous model.¹⁴

Business accounts: the self-serve hub for small and micro businesses is free.⁶ Its terms define a small business account as one sending no more than 10,000 business messages per calendar month.¹⁸

Any SMS fallback a partner adds is charged as SMS. Ask how a message is billed when it fails on Viber and goes out as SMS, so you do not pay twice for one notice.

This section describes rules; it is not legal advice.

Opt-in is a contract term, not only a law. Viber's partner guidelines require the recipient's consent before any Business Message is sent. The consent must say the person is opting in to messages over Viber, must name the business, and the sender must keep proof of it; messages sent without it are treated as spam.¹⁷ The partner or the business, not Viber, is responsible for meeting each country's legal consent rules.¹⁷ See opt-in and consent is a data model.

Business account terms. Businesses may only start chats with their own customers, must label marketing messages and must hold the consents needed to process customers' data.¹⁸ Customers can block a business at any time.²²

Data protection. For users in the European Economic Area and the UK, Viber Media S.à r.l., a Luxembourg company, is the controller of users' personal data under the GDPR, and users can complain to Luxembourg's data protection authority (the CNPD) or their own.¹⁹ The business remains the controller of the customer data it holds and sends; Viber's role does not replace the business's own duties.

National access. Availability can change by country: Russia's regulator blocked Viber in December 2024, citing non-compliance with Russian rules for information distributors.²⁰

• Reach outside its strongholds is thin. Adding Viber where few customers use it adds cost and work without reach.
• Cross-border pricing. A company headquartered outside the recipient's country pays international rates.¹⁵
• Bots are no longer free. Every new bot carries a monthly fee, and messages outside the 24-hour session are billed.¹⁴
• Opt-in records. Without stored proof of consent, a campaign can be treated as spam and the partner held liable.¹⁷
• Fallback design. If SMS fallback is unclear, one notice can be billed twice.
• Only Viber users. A Business Message reaches only people with a Viber account on that number, and delivered and seen events exist only for them;¹² everyone else needs another channel.
• Country availability. A national block, as in Russia in 2024, can end a channel overnight.²⁰

Only what Rakuten Viber has announced:

• 2026 policy changes. Rakuten Viber says it is introducing Viber eSIM services, new AI-powered features and expanded business tools, adds automated business categorisation as a ranking factor in its business directory, and brings business accounts under a single fair-usage policy.²¹
• Verification and security. Verification messages and SecurePlus (November 2024) mark a push into codes and sensitive notices, positioned against SMS.⁸
• Calls and AI. Business calls (January 2024) and AI chat summaries (April 2024) show Viber adding features inside the same chat where customers already talk to businesses.⁷¹¹

Choose Viber when a meaningful share of your customers live in countries where it is the everyday app, such as Ukraine or the Philippines on Rakuten's own figures, and when you want branded, trackable messages for codes and updates, with SMS kept as the fallback (see SMS 101). Add a chatbot when people will subscribe for ongoing service and you can live with a monthly fee per bot.

A practical way to decide is a small test: send one kind of transactional message on Viber in one country, with SMS as the fallback, and compare how many customers it reaches and what each delivered message costs against SMS alone.

Look elsewhere when your customers are spread across markets where Viber is rare, or when you cannot collect and keep Viber-specific opt-in. For comparisons, see channels are not interchangeable, choosing a channel per message, the Viber channel page and the Channels 101 chooser, which channel for which need.