| Type | If no activity in the chat in the last 24 hours | If activity in the chat in the last 24 hours |
|---|---|---|
| Template (Utility, Authentication, or Service categories) | Permitted: YES Cost: YES. Priced based on template category and recipient country. Charged per recipient. Frequency cap: NONE | Permitted: YES Cost: FREE Frequency cap: NONE |
| Template (Marketing category) | Permitted: YES Cost: YES. Priced based on template category and recipient country. Charged per recipient. Frequency cap: YES. WhatsApp caps the number of Marketing templates an individual can receive in a given period, from any WA API account (not just your account). If any individual in the chat has hit this cap, the template will not be delivered. | Permitted: YES Cost: YES. Priced based on template category and recipient country. Charged per recipient. Frequency cap: NONE |
| Freeform | Permitted: NO | Permitted: YES Cost: FREE Frequency cap: NONE |
WhatsApp Process and Policies
Sending Messages from the API
WhatsApp policies for message sending
If you want to send any kind of message into a chat from the API phone number (and use our API to do so), you’ll first need to understand WhatsApp policies for API messaging, and build your feature to ensure that these rules are followed or else your feature won’t work. The policies below apply the same to both direct chats and group chats. You can find more from WhatsApp on the topic here.
There are two message types that an API can send into the chat: a template (specific preset content and structure, which has been approved and categorized by WhatsApp), and a freeform message. Depending on the activity state of the chat and how many API messages some participants in the chat have received recently, WhatsApp may apply a frequency cap and choose to not deliver some of these messages. If a message is being sent into a group chat and the frequency cap has been reached for even one person in that group, then the message won’t be sent to anyone in the group chat.
Due to the 24 hour rule, historically freeform messages are most often used in customer service or bot use cases, where they are responding to a customer inbound.
Note that our API will respond with a success message if our software did its job in sending the message to WhatsApp to be delivered, even if WhatsApp failed to deliver the message. Instead, Coral will notify you by email to the Coral user account who created the API keys if a template fails to be delivered into a chat; currently we do not send an email notification if a freeform message failed to be delivered into a chat.