Skip to main content
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. WhatsApp will bill you directly for sending messages from the API, this will not go through your Coral bill. 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. Most of the broadcast messages you will want to send will use a template message, and will be categorized by WhatsApp into a “Marketing template” or “Utility template”; most templates you will want to send will be considered a Marketing template by WhatsApp, such as a message that contains products for sale, has an event invitation, or even simply says “Hello!”.  You can read more about the different template categories here.  If WhatsApp believes you miscategorized your template after you create it, they will automatically re-categorize it for you as part of the template approval process.   Depending on the activity state of the chat and how many Marketing templates some potential recipients have received recently (whether in your chat or in another unrelated WhatsApp chat), WhatsApp may apply a frequency cap and choose to not deliver some of your Marketing templates to that recipient. 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. Coral has developed proprietary tooling to increase deliverability of your Marketing messages while staying within WhatsApp policy; please talk to your Coral rep for more information. 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.