How much does it cost to top up wallet messages for a busy car wash month?

The short answer: 5 to 20 SAR, and it rarely changes your plan

Topping up wallet messages costs 5 SAR for 500 extra messages, 10 SAR for 1,000, or 20 SAR for unlimited for the rest of that month, bought from the Store tab in the dashboard the moment you're close to your monthly cap. For almost every car wash, one busy week doesn't justify moving up a plan tier — it justifies a 10 SAR top-up.

The cap only matters on Growth, at 5,000 wallet messages a month. Free stops far earlier, at 100 customers and 100 messages total, so a shop still on Free hits the customer ceiling long before it hits a message ceiling worth topping up. Premium removes the number entirely: messages are unlimited on the 149 SAR a month tier.

The one case worth watching is a shop that overshoots every month, not just during a dust storm. Buying a 1,000-message top-up twelve times a year is 120 SAR; the jump from Growth's 85 SAR to Premium's 149 SAR is 768 SAR a year. Below roughly six or seven overage months a year, top-ups are cheaper. Above that, Premium is.

A worked month: a 3-branch wash on Growth during a dust storm

Take a 3-branch wash on Growth (85 SAR a month, 5,000 messages included), with 1,800 customers enrolled across the branches. In an ordinary month, the automatic triggers alone — welcome on signup, a message when a stamp is added, one on reward redemption, and the 14-day win-back check — add up to roughly 3,790 sends, comfortably under the cap.

Then a multi-day dust storm hits and the shop schedules a one-off broadcast to every enrolled customer across the 3 branches: 1,800 more sends in a single week. That pushes the month's total to about 5,590 — 590 over the 5,000-message allowance.

The fix costs 10 SAR: a single 1,000-message top-up covers the 590 overage with headroom to spare for the rest of the month. Buying two 500-message packs instead would also cover it for the same 10 SAR, so either purchase works; there's no reason to reach for the 20 SAR unlimited top-up for an overage this small.

Where the baseline 3,790 messages actually comes from

It's worth breaking the baseline down before assuming a top-up is needed at all, because most shops overestimate how many messages their automatic triggers actually send. On 1,800 enrolled customers at roughly 1.8 visits a month each, the stamp-added trigger alone accounts for most of the volume — everything else is a smaller add-on.

None of this includes geofence pings, because geofence messages don't draw from the message balance at all — more on that below.

• Welcome message on enrollment: ~120 sends (new signups that month)
• Stamp-added trigger: ~3,240 sends (1,800 customers × ~1.8 visits)
• Reward-redeemed trigger: ~150 sends
• 14-day win-back trigger (daily scan, 30-day dedupe): ~280 sends
• Total baseline before any campaign: ~3,790 of the 5,000 included

The geofence trick that costs zero messages

Before reaching for a top-up during a dust event, use geofence instead of a broadcast where it fits: it puts your message on a customer's lock screen when their phone is near your branch, and it costs zero message quota because it isn't a wallet-message send at all. It's Apple Wallet only, works for up to 10 branch locations per card, with a radius between 50 and 500 meters (150 m by default), and it's set from the Branches screen — not from the address text on the card design.

A short, specific geofence line works better than a generic one anyway: "Dust today — bring the car in, stamp #4 is waiting." Routing regular drive-by reminders through geofence instead of a broadcast is the single easiest way to keep a busy month under the 5,000-message cap in the first place.

Free's ceiling arrives before the message cap does

A shop still on the Free plan won't recognize this problem, because Free stops at 100 customers and 100 messages a month, whichever comes first — for most single-branch washes, the customer ceiling arrives first. New enrollments simply pause at 100 customers; everyone already enrolled keeps their card and keeps collecting stamps.

Growth removes the customer ceiling and raises messages to 5,000 a month, which is where the top-up question in this article starts to matter. It's also worth remembering that Waya has no POS or till integration — a stamp is only added when staff scan the customer's card on an ordinary phone, so message volume tracks scanning discipline as much as it tracks foot traffic.

Check and top up your balance in five steps

None of this requires guessing. The dashboard shows your running total against your plan's allowance, and a top-up takes under a minute to buy.

1. Open the Store tab

   It's in the main dashboard navigation, alongside billing and plan settings.

2. Check your usage against your cap

   The Store shows messages sent this month against Growth's 5,000 or Free's 100.

3. Estimate the shortfall

   Add up any scheduled campaign or broadcast you're about to send on top of your usual trigger volume.

4. Pick a top-up size

   500 messages for 5 SAR, 1,000 for 10 SAR, or unlimited for the rest of the month for 20 SAR.

5. Confirm the purchase

   The top-up applies immediately, so a scheduled campaign queued right after won't bounce for lack of quota.

When to stop topping up and move to Premium instead

Treat a top-up as the right tool for an occasional spike — a dust storm, a National Day push, a one-off reopening announcement — and treat a recurring overage as a signal to compare plans properly. If a 3-branch wash tops up most months of the year, the arithmetic above (roughly 120 SAR a year in top-ups versus 768 SAR a year to move from Growth to Premium) tips toward staying on Growth and buying the occasional pack.

Only shops that are consistently over the cap, or that also want unlimited branches, unlimited cards, and the Premium-only accounting connectors, get more value from upgrading outright than from buying message packs as needed.