Blog · 2026-09-17

LINE Official Account: The Complete Guide to Setup, Pricing and Automation (2026)

LINE Official Account Medium and High plans go up on 1 November 2026, and 27 October is the last day to opt out before the increase. This guide covers account types, the application process, the new fee structure, and which jobs belong in the admin console versus an API build.

Start with the urgent part. On 1 September 2026 LINE announced that the monthly fee for the Medium and High plans changes from 1 November: Medium goes from 800 to 1,000 TWD, High goes from 1,200 to 1,400 TWD, both before tax. The same announcement states that staying on a Medium or High plan after 27 October counts as accepting the new price. If you do not accept it, you have to switch down to the Light plan before 27 October.

If you are on Medium or High right now, skip straight to section three.

How a LINE Official Account differs from a personal account

A LINE Official Account (LINE OA) is the account a shop, a brand or a solo operator uses to serve the public. It runs on a completely separate system from the personal account you chat with friends on. The old LINE@ product was folded into it years ago, so the "LINE@ official account" you find in older articles is the same thing.

In practice the biggest difference is not the feature list. It is who owns the account.

Serving customers through a staff member's personal LINE is the easiest thing to do in the short term. The price is that your customer list lives on one person's phone. When that person quits, loses the phone, or falls out with you, the list goes with them. This is the most common and most expensive mistake small businesses make.

Account types and the application process

Accounts come in two types, unverified and verified. LINE updated how the verification badge is displayed in April 2026, so treat the admin console as the source of truth for the current styling.

Unverified accounts are open to anyone, need no review, and have full basic functionality. The drawback is that they usually do not appear in search results inside the LINE app, so friends can only add you through a link, a QR code or an ID.

Verified accounts require you to submit documents for review. Once approved you get better recognition and you can be found in search. Approval criteria and turnaround times are whatever the admin console currently says they are. Any outside site promising you will definitely pass is not worth believing.

The path we recommend is to open an unverified account first, set up your welcome message, auto-replies and Rich Menu, run it for a month, then apply for verification. Making the account look competent matters more than getting the badge early.

Decide three things before you apply:

1. The account name. It has to stay consistent with your website and your social profiles. If you run multiple stores, work out now whether you want one master account that routes through a menu, or one account per store.
2. Which email address and LINE account the admin uses. Use something the company controls long term, not an intern's personal inbox. You will thank yourself at handover time.
3. What the user gets for adding you. Why should they? If you have no answer, hold off on printing the QR code.

Always apply through the official LINE entry point. If someone offers to handle the application or guarantee verification for you, and they ask for your password, verification code or top-level admin access, do not hand it over. An official account is a brand asset, and permissions are hard to claw back once given away.

How the new November 2026 LINE OA pricing works

The published plan table

The High plan add-on rate also changes, into 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. Buy 60,000 add-on messages in a month and the first 50,000 are still 0.2 each, with only the final 10,000 at 0.15. The free message allowance stays the same on all three plans.

You are billed per recipient, not per message

This is where most people get the maths wrong. LINE's own pricing calculator asks you 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. Send four times in a month and that is 12,000. The Medium plan's 3,000 free messages are actually only enough to broadcast once to 3,000 friends.

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.

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 message costs are close to zero. Bills blow up almost exclusively because someone broadcast to the entire friend list without filtering.

Put 27 October in your calendar

The announcement is blunt about it. Continuing on a Medium or High plan after 27 October counts as accepting the increase, and anyone who does not accept it needs to drop to Light before then.

There are also two maintenance windows in the same period, one from 8am on 28 October through 2 November, and one from 8am on 24 November through 25 November. During maintenance you cannot buy a new plan, upgrade, downgrade, or adjust your message cap. If you intend to change plans, get it done before 27 October.

One more thing. If you pay by credit card on auto-renewal, add a secondary payment method in the console. When the primary card fails the system falls back to the second one, so a failed renewal does not interrupt your service. Three minutes of work saves you a month of hassle.

Max out the half that costs nothing

Welcome messages, auto-replies and the Rich Menu are all free, which makes them the three highest-return things you can touch.

The welcome message decides whether the user blocks you on the spot. Writing "thanks for adding us" wastes the one free opening you get. Cover three things: who you are, what problem you solve for them, and what to do next. Lead with a promotion and your block rate will be impressive.

The Rich Menu is the mobile home page of your official account. Put only your most-used entry points in it: online booking, this month's offer, FAQs, talk to a human. Write concrete labels. Nobody taps something as abstract as "Our services". People do tap "Book online" and "Check my points". When a campaign ends, pull the dead entry out, and check once a month that every link still works.

The part that eats the most time here is revising and previewing over and over. Our LINE OA platform turns the Rich Menu into a visual drag-and-drop layout with live preview and one-click publishing, and we lay the cells out along the conversion path: which cell gets booking and which gets support is a routing decision, not a design decision.

Auto-replies handle the repeat questions: opening hours, address, prices, returns policy, how to book. Two things people usually miss. First, always leave a human exit, spelled out: "For help from a person, just send us a message. We reply weekdays 10:00 to 19:00." Second, when the auto-reply cannot answer, it should say so and hand off. A forced wrong answer damages trust more than no answer.

The finer your trigger conditions, the higher the share of conversations that automation can take. We use keyword, event and condition triggers together, then layer an AI support agent with a RAG knowledge base on top. Answers come only from your own knowledge base, and anything it cannot find goes to a human instead of getting invented.

Do this layer properly and your paid broadcast count drops on its own.

Marketing automation: segmentation is a cost problem first, a precision problem second

Most articles on segmentation talk about lifting conversion rates. On LINE, segmentation is a cost problem before it is anything else.

Say you have 10,000 friends, four campaigns to push this month, and you are on the High plan.

Broadcast to everyone: 10,000 × 4 = 40,000 messages. Subtract the 6,000 free, buy 34,000 at roughly 6,800 TWD, 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.

Same four campaigns, 5,600 apart, and a lower block rate on top. The first return on segmentation is the message spend you did not make. The conversion lift comes later.

Segmentation needs tags. Tags come from five places: applied by hand during one-on-one chat, Rich Menu click behaviour, acquisition source (which QR code they came in through), website behaviour sent back to LINE, and matching against order data. The first three you can do in the console. The last two need an API. Once you get that far, your LINE Official Account starts to look like a LINE CRM.

We built this straight into the product. Segmented push groups friends automatically by tag and behaviour so you pick the right people before you send. CRM contact management keeps the user profile, the behaviour trail and the tags on one screen, so support can see what this person has tapped and which stage they are stuck at before they pick up the conversation.

When to build a LINE bot on the Messaging API

If the console can do it, use the console. Do not automate for the sake of automating. These four situations are where the console stops being enough.

You need to reconcile against your own system. Order status, membership tier and points balance live in your database, and the LINE console cannot see any of it. Showing that in a conversation, or triggering off it, means connecting the two sides with an API.

You need real-time event triggers. A reminder 30 minutes after an unpaid order, a reminder the day before an appointment, a reminder before points expire. Messages driven by a state change plus a time offset are beyond console scheduling.

You need identity mapping. LINE gives you a platform-side user identifier, and your membership system has its own account numbers. Those are two separate numbering schemes and you need a binding table in between. Binding has to verify ownership. If a user can type an account number into the chat box and be considered bound, anyone can bind someone else's account to their own LINE.

You are moving money. Payouts, points issuance and refunds all touch a balance, so every one of them needs a unique reference number and must be idempotent, with a repeated reference crediting only once. Get this wrong and your retry logic is an automatic money leak.

The hard part after you connect the API is not the integration. It is the failure paths. When a request times out, the money may or may not have landed. You cannot blindly retry those, and you cannot mark them failed either. You query the order first, confirm its state, then decide. We broke down a full membership bot design in Automating check-ins, payouts and prize draws, covering identity mapping, how to pick a unique key that actually prevents duplicates, idempotent crediting, and the three things you must have before launch: auto-start, alerting and backups.

We use all of this every day. 8-stage funnel tracking sorts every friend into a stage automatically, from newly added to engaged to registered to regular, so you can see where people sit and where they drop out. If you need to connect your own order or membership system, API integration comes with the Professional plan.

We turned the whole thing into the LINE OA platform

Everything above runs as one system in our console:

• Rich Menu builder: visual drag-and-drop layout, live preview, one-click publish
• Keyword auto-reply: keyword, event and condition triggers
• AI support agent: RAG knowledge base plus an LLM, available around the clock, hands off to a human when it cannot answer
• Segmented push: pick recipients by lifecycle stage, tag and behaviour, so message spend goes to the right people
• 8-stage funnel tracking: every friend sorted into a stage automatically, with visible drop-off points
• CRM contact management: user profiles, behaviour trails and the tag system in one place

Three tiers, monthly fee in USDT, no lock-in:

We said earlier that an official account is a brand asset. We hold ourselves to that: the official account in your plan is registered under your name, not parked under ours. Pausing it or moving it is always your call.

The engine was originally built for high-conversion industries, and the funnel stages can be renamed to match your business. "Return visit" for a restaurant and "repeat purchase" for an ecommerce store run on the same mechanism. Full specs and the onboarding process are at LINE OA platform. If your customers come in through Telegram instead, Telegram Bot is the same approach.

FAQ

Is a LINE Official Account free? Opening one is free. The Light plan costs 0 per month and includes 200 free messages, with no add-on messages available. You only need Medium or High if you want to send more.

Can I open two LINE Official Accounts? Yes, one LINE account can create several official accounts. Multi-store brands usually go one of two ways: a single master account that routes through the Rich Menu, or one account per store run separately. The first saves message spend, the second feels more local. It depends on where your support staffing sits.

How do I apply for a LINE Official Account? Create the account through the official LINE entry point. Fill in the basic details and your unverified account is live. Set the name, profile image, description, welcome message, auto-replies and admin permissions, then think about applying for verification.

What is the difference between an official account and a regular account? A regular account is for personal chat. An official account has its own admin console, permission levels for a team, broadcasting, analytics and API access. The real difference is that an official account belongs to the company and a personal account belongs to a person.

How exactly are messages counted? By recipient delivered. One message to 1,000 friends is 1,000 messages. Welcome messages, one-on-one chat, auto-response messages, AI auto-response messages and Reply API messages through the Messaging API are not billed.

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.