India's RCS just hit 550 million users. Your SME stack is about to get real.

2026-07-07 — marketing strategy SME India

I was talking to a founder last week about his message bill. He kept saying it wasn't that bad. Then he showed me the spreadsheet.

For the last five or six years, Indian SMEs have had basically one conversation with themselves: WhatsApp or SMS. That's been it. SMS gets you everywhere but let you say almost nothing. WhatsApp lets you send rich content but started charging like you were sending each customer a personal letter. Nothing sat in the middle that actually worked.

Then RCS showed up. Again.

Look, RCS has been "the next big thing" for so long that we all stopped paying attention. I include us in that. Most consultants—actually, most companies—had basically written it off by 2024. But the numbers shifted in 2026, and they shifted hard. According to Infobip's report from earlier this year, RCS interactions in India grew 70% in twelve months. The active user base is at 550 million now. When Apple added RCS to iOS 18, the last major phone maker sitting out stepped in. Google was already there. Jio, Airtel, Vi—all on board. The infrastructure excuse disappeared.

Tanla Platforms processes about 35 billion RCS messages a year, which is roughly 80% of what India is actually sending through RCS. That's not a vanity metric. The Tanla-Airtel partnership announced this year has the companies estimating they'll hit 100 billion messages within two years when everything goes live. That's when you know a channel has stopped being optional and started being part of how business actually works.

Why this matters to your costs

If you're sending a few thousand messages monthly, WhatsApp's per-conversation pricing hasn't hurt yet. But push hundreds of thousands of OTPs and order confirmations through there month after month, and the math looks different. A lot different. SMS still works almost everywhere but gives you 160 characters to do your job, which works fine for "your parcel is here" and fails for basically anything else. RCS lets you put an image and buttons and interactive carousels straight into the native message app. No app download. No new sign-up. Just there.

VeUp Technologies—relatively new at this—is already handling 300 million messages a month for over 200 companies in fintech, healthcare, logistics, that kind of space. They're sitting at 99% OTP delivery success. They're not the point. The point is that a platform that didn't exist a couple of years ago is running volume at that scale, which tells you something about where money actually moves when it gets a choice.

The real question isn't whether RCS matters eventually.

It clearly does. Enterprise buyers are already moving. The actual question is whether the tooling and pricing get accessible to smaller businesses before or after you've already paid too much on WhatsApp to think about switching. And whether you want to start testing now while there's less noise and the novelty engagement premium is still there.

Don't blow up your entire messaging stack based on one report. But if you're running pure WhatsApp Business API and bulk SMS, actually sit down and do the math on cost-per-outcome, not cost-per-message. A message that can embed a payment link or a product card in the same thread as a shipping notification is doing different work than the other two options. Your SMS provider can't give you that. Your WhatsApp costs probably don't justify the volume for what you need. RCS sits exactly between those two problems, and in India right now, it reaches 550 million people. That number only goes one direction.