Do I need a WhatsApp Business API account, and how do I get one?
Yes — the free WhatsApp Business app on a phone cannot be automated in any supported way, so anything beyond manual replies requires the Business Platform. Getting access means a Meta Business account, a verified business, a phone number dedicated to the API, and a display name that Meta approves. The number is genuinely dedicated: once it is on the API it can no longer be used in the normal WhatsApp app, which surprises people who wanted to keep using their existing business number by hand. We handle the technical setup and guide the verification, but the account is registered to you rather than to us, for the same reason everything else here deploys to your accounts — you keep the number, the templates and the message history if we stop working together.
What are template messages, and why do they matter so much?
They are the single most important constraint to understand before scoping, because they shape what is possible. WhatsApp only lets a business message someone freely within 24 hours of that person's last message. Outside that window you may only send a pre-approved template, submitted to Meta in advance and reviewed against their rules — which permit transactional and expected content but not unsolicited marketing. In practice this means anything proactive (reminders, order updates, renewal notices) has to be designed as templates up front, with variables slotted in at send time, rather than composed freely. It also means a conversation that goes quiet for a day cannot simply be resumed. We design the template set during scoping, because discovering this after the build changes what the system can do.
What does WhatsApp itself charge, and is that separate from the build?
Separate, and billed by Meta directly to your account rather than through us. WhatsApp charges per conversation rather than per message, with the rate varying by country and by conversation category — a service conversation the customer started is priced differently from a marketing one you initiated, and rates differ substantially between markets. Meta also revises this pricing periodically, which is exactly why we do not quote figures here: a number published today would be wrong within a year and worse than no number. What we do during scoping is estimate your likely conversation volume and category mix so you can look up current rates and model the cost before committing. You hold the account, so you see real usage rather than a marked-up line on our invoice.
Can it hand over to a human?
Yes, and it should — this is the part that decides whether customers end up trusting the channel. Handover triggers on explicit request, on repeated failure to understand, on detected frustration, or on any topic you have marked as human-only, such as complaints or anything involving a refund. Your team picks up in whatever they already use: a shared inbox, a helpdesk, or a simple agent view we build. The full conversation goes with it, so nobody is asked to repeat themselves. Because WhatsApp is a persistent thread rather than a session, the handover is invisible to the customer — they are simply still in the same chat, now with a person. Handover is scoped as a core feature, not a fallback.
Is this different from the chatbot widget on a website?
Same underlying capabilities, meaningfully different constraints and behaviour. WhatsApp is asynchronous and persistent: someone can reply four hours later and the thread is still there, which is better for the customer and means the system must hold state far longer than a web session. It is identity-bound to a phone number, so you know who you are talking to across conversations without a login. It supports proactive outbound messaging, which a website widget cannot do at all. Against that, it is governed by Meta's rules — the 24-hour window, template approval, per-conversation pricing — where your own website is not. Many businesses run both from the same logic and knowledge base, which is how we usually build it.