I just implemented a WhatsApp bot for a small business. Implementation was fairly easy. What was horrible was navigating the mess of Meta Business Manager with personal and business entity accounts, unlinking the app to free the phone number, getting that reverified, yada yada yada. Just give people an easy API setup and start seeing great things happen.

WhatsApp business api is in a weird situation.

the poor countries use WhatsApp mostly due the fact that sms was costly.

so you're tryna to monetize against businesses serving poorer users. yes - they maybe more in number but margins are razor thin.

the richer countries where margins are higher - sms, email, etc are cheaper & permission less. so eventually most providers most settling on email & sms/rcs.

It's weird how hard it is to get programmatic access to a mobile-first messaging service. Telegram is the only one that makes it easy. WhatsApp and iMessage have first party solutions that assume you're a business with 1:M comms. Signal doesn't want bot users at all.

Maybe I need to start looking at SMS/MMS proper, but that's putting a lot of information in the clear and giving up a lot of features.

WhatsApp is getting expensive as hell.

Flagging for clear AI slop

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