WhatsApp Business Platform

Meta‘s platform for businesses to message customers on WhatsApp at scale, delivered through the Cloud API (Meta-hosted; successor to the older self-hosted On-Premises API). It is the founding subject of this spoke — the messaging substrate every other page here sits on.

The model

• Anchored to a whatsapp-business-account (WABA) — the top-level entity that owns business phone numbers, templates, and settings.
• Permissioned & metered — not an open messaging socket. Businesses send through verified phone numbers, and messaging is priced. The model is now per-message-pricing: since 1 July 2025 Meta bills each delivered template message, having deprecated the earlier conversation-based scheme whatsapp-pricing-docs.
• Two message modes. Business-initiated messages must use a pre-approved template; free-form replies are allowed only inside a customer-initiated customer-service-window (24 hours). This template gate is the platform’s defining constraint, and the window is now a price as well as a permission.
• Inbound via webhooks — incoming messages and delivery/read/status events are pushed to the integrator’s endpoint.
• Beyond text — media, interactive buttons/lists, location, reactions, product catalogs/commerce, authentication flows, and (newer) voice calling and groups. Documented in whatsapp-business-platform-docs.

How integrators reach it

Two layers this spoke tracks:

• Client SDKs — e.g. wapi-go, wrapping the raw API for direct integration.
• BSPs / Solution Partners — approved intermediaries offering embedded signup + a shared credit line so a business need not integrate Meta directly. Wassenger is a live BSP-class example.

And a third route that is not this platform at all. Libraries such as baileys speak the WhatsApp Web protocol directly, pairing an ordinary account by QR code — no WABA, no template approval, no metering, and prohibited by Meta’s terms. chatery-whatsapp is the worked example. Everything else on this page describes the sanctioned door; that one exists beside it and is documented here because it bounds what the sanctioned door actually sells (synthesis).

One of three channels (as of 2026-07-30)

This spoke opened with WhatsApp alone and now holds two more operators for comparison: rcs-business-messaging (Google, with carriers sharing the gate) and apple-messages-for-business (Apple, with a mandatory intermediary). WhatsApp is the most open of the three at the integration layer — it is the only one supporting a direct client-SDK path — and the most controlling at the message layer, approving each template individually. See sender-verification and synthesis.

Sources: whatsapp-business-platform-docs, whatsapp-solution-partner, wapi-go, whatsapp-pricing-docs.