Meta's Business Agent went globally available on 3 Jun 2026 across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram — free to activate, with paid subscription offerings announced for the coming months and more than one million businesses already using it pre-rollout per Meta — and because the free period is explicitly temporary, the rational small-business move is to treat it as an evaluation window: activate on a bounded slice, measure resolution rate and supervision cost (how often it says something you would not have said), and know the price at which it is worth paying before the tiers are announced.

Anchored on Meta's 3 Jun 2026 announcement 'Be There for Every Customer With Meta Business Agent' (about.fb.com/news/2026/06/meta-business-agent/ — fetched directly 2026-06-09): global expansion to businesses of all sizes; platforms WhatsApp + Messenger + Instagram; 'getting started is free' + 'in the coming months, businesses will access the agent through paid subscription offerings, with options for businesses of every size' (verbatim); 'More than one million businesses are already using a Meta Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger to respond to customers around the clock' (verbatim, vendor-reported); capabilities verbatim ('Answer questions specific to your business; Make product recommendations from a business catalog; Book appointments and qualify incoming leads'). No named exec is quoted in the announcement — the blockquote is institutional, attributed to Meta's announcement (no person invented). Operator-register advisory; claim is the free-window-as-evaluation-window stance + the supervision discipline (agent handles reversible, human gates commitments), NOT an endorsement of Meta over alternatives. 30-day cadence — the unpriced subscription is the live variable. Triggers: (1) Meta announces actual subscription pricing (converts evaluation into buy decision); (2) capability/policy changes to what the agent may promise on a business's behalf; (3) early operator evidence that resolution quality does not match the pitch. Siblings: OPS (ai-customer-service-small-business), OPS-043 (solo-founder customer-service stack), OPS-091 (HubSpot pay-per-resolution — outcome-pricing contrast), OPS-084 (ai-sdr-human-in-the-loop), OPS-097 (calendar hygiene).