Blog · 2026-09-17
LINE Broadcast Messages: How Billing Works, How to Segment, How to Avoid Blocks (2026)
Broadcasting is the only part of a LINE Official Account that genuinely costs money. This guide works through the billing unit, the new rates from November 2026, how much segmentation actually saves, and the sending rhythm that keeps people from blocking you.
Most of what a LINE Official Account does is free. The Rich Menu is free, auto-replies are free, one-on-one chat is free. The only thing that generates a bill is broadcasting.
So the real question about broadcasting is not how to send. It is who you send to, how often, and what one message costs. This guide starts with the money.
You are billed per recipient, not per message
This is where most people get the maths wrong. LINE's own pricing calculator asks for your target friend count and your number of broadcasts per month. Multiply the two and that is what you consume.
One campaign message sent to 3,000 friends burns 3,000 messages, not one.
| Friends | Broadcasts per month | Messages consumed |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 4 | 4,000 |
| 3,000 | 4 | 12,000 |
| 10,000 | 4 | 40,000 |
| 10,000 | 8 | 80,000 |
This cost structure is nothing like email. Email has a marginal cost close to zero. On LINE the marginal cost grows linearly with your friend count. The more friends you have, the more a careless broadcast costs you.
The new rates from November 2026
On 1 September 2026 LINE announced that the monthly fee for the Medium and High plans changes from 1 November.
| Plan | Monthly fee (TWD, before tax) | Free messages per month | Add-on messages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light plan | 0, unchanged | 200 | Not available |
| Medium plan | 800 → 1,000 | 3,000 | Not available, you have to upgrade to High to send more |
| High plan | 1,200 → 1,400 | 6,000 | Available, tiered |
The High plan add-on rate also moves to two brackets: 0.2 TWD each for messages 1 to 50,000, and 0.15 TWD each from message 50,001 onward. The tiers are cumulative, so buying 60,000 add-on messages in a month still charges 0.2 for the first 50,000.
The announcement also states plainly that staying on a Medium or High plan after 27 October counts as accepting the new price. If you do not accept it, switch down to Light before then. There are two maintenance windows in the same period, so if you intend to change plans, get it done before 27 October.
One limit on the Medium plan gets overlooked constantly: no add-on messages. With 3,000 friends and two broadcasts a month, the Medium plan's 3,000 message allowance only covers one. The second one means upgrading the whole plan to High. You cannot just buy messages.
Five message types that are not billed
LINE publishes this list of free message types:
- Welcome messages for new friends
- One-on-one chat messages
- Auto-response messages
- AI auto-response messages
- Reply API messages through the Messaging API
Once you read that list the cost structure is obvious: responding is free, pushing costs money. Run your official account as a service channel and your LINE message costs are close to zero. Bills blow up almost exclusively because someone broadcast to the entire friend list without filtering.
So the first job is not cutting broadcasts. It is maxing out the half that costs nothing. Set up the welcome message, auto-replies and Rich Menu first, and every question they catch is a push you never have to send. Setup is covered in LINE Auto-Reply Setup and the complete LINE Rich Menu guide.
What segmentation saves, calculated properly
Say you have 10,000 friends, four campaigns to push this month, and you are on the High plan.
The same four campaigns, two ways to send, monthly cost
Broadcast to everyone: 10,000 × 4 = 40,000 messages. Subtract the 6,000 free, buy 34,000 at roughly 6,800, add the 1,400 monthly fee, and the month costs about 8,200.
Send by segment, assuming each campaign is only relevant to about 3,000 friends: 3,000 × 4 = 12,000 messages. Subtract the free allowance, buy 6,000 at roughly 1,200, add the 1,400 monthly fee, and the month costs about 2,600.
That is 5,600 apart, with a lower block rate on top. The first return on segmentation is the message spend you did not make. The conversion lift comes later.
Where tags come from
Segmentation needs tags. There are five sources, and the first three work in the console.
- Applied by hand during one-on-one chat. The crudest method and the most accurate. Tag what the customer told you.
- Acquisition source. Someone who scanned the in-store QR code and someone who came from an ad should be getting different content anyway.
- Rich Menu taps. Anyone who tapped "Sensitive skin" is interested in that category.
- Website behaviour sent back to LINE. Which product page they viewed, what they added to the cart. This needs an API.
- Matching against order data. What they bought and how long since they reordered. This needs a connection to your own system.
Once you have four and five working, your LINE Official Account starts to look like a LINE CRM. Tags in the console can only be applied by hand, so tagging based on an action requires a third-party tool or your own API build.
Three rhythms that keep people from blocking you
Block rate matters more than open rate. Once someone blocks you they are unreachable forever, and you still paid for the message that did it.
Rotation is the one that gets ignored. People keep your account because it is useful to them, and there is no reason to keep it if everything is a promotion. On timing, avoiding late nights is the baseline. LINE is a messaging app and messages land right in front of people.
We built this into a product
Segmentation only works if tags accumulate on their own and you can actually pick recipients. Our LINE OA platform closes that loop:
- Segmented push: pick recipients by lifecycle stage, tag and behaviour. Sending to the right people saves real money
- 8-stage funnel tracking: every friend sorted into a stage automatically, from newly added to engaged to regular, with no manual classification
- CRM contact management: user profiles, behaviour trails and tags in one place
- Keyword auto-reply: keyword, event and condition triggers, so you max out the half that costs nothing
- API integration: pull in website behaviour and order data and tag automatically
Three tiers, monthly fee in USDT, no lock-in:
| Plan | Monthly fee | Official accounts | Friend cap | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $29 USDT | 1 | 5,000 | Rich Menu design, keyword auto-reply, basic funnel tracking |
| Growth | $79 USDT | 3 | 30,000 | Adds AI support agent, full 8-stage funnel tracking, segmented push |
| Professional | $199 USDT | 5 | Unlimited | Adds CRM contact management, API integration into your backend |
The official account in your plan is registered under your own name, not parked under ours. Full specs are at LINE OA platform.
FAQ
How is a LINE broadcast billed? By recipient delivered. One message to 1,000 friends is 1,000 messages. Your monthly consumption is the number of broadcasts times the number of recipients per broadcast.
Can I broadcast on the free plan? Yes, the Light plan includes 200 free messages a month. But 200 means 200 deliveries in total, so with 200 friends that is one broadcast a month.
Is a push the same thing as a broadcast? In everyday use, a LINE push usually means a broadcast. Both go out to friends on your initiative and both are billed. The difference is that a segmented push only goes to a specific group, while a full broadcast goes to everyone.
Can I recall a broadcast after sending? No. Once it is sent it is sent, and the allowance is already spent. Always check how it renders using a test account before you send.
How many times a month should I send? There is no universal answer, but once a week is the safe line in most industries. Rather than cutting the number of sends, segment them so the same person is not on every one.
Plans and rates in this article come from LINE's official announcement of 1 September 2026, and all amounts are before tax. LINE adjusts plan contents and rates from time to time, so treat the current information in the LINE Official Account Manager as authoritative.
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