What is WhatsApp Cloud API?

In this document, we'll help you understand what the WhatsApp Cloud API is and how to use it to reach out to your customers on WhatsApp. Meta (the company that owns WhatsApp) provides two different WhatsApp solutions:

WhatsApp Solutions

WhatsApp is the standard messaging app that is used by billions of people across the globe to chat with friends and family. They also provide a WhatsApp Web portal that you can use from your browser.

WhatsApp Business Platform, on the other hand, is a different vertical that focuses on providing solutions to small, medium, and large businesses to send and receive WhatsApp messages from their customers.

The WhatsApp Business mobile app is one such product that comes under the WhatsApp Business platform. This app is different from the standard WhatsApp app and provides businesses with an extra set of features to communicate with their customers. Millions of small businesses use this mobile app to manage communication with their customers.

Now, apart from the mobile app, they also provide a programmatic solution where you can use their APIs to send and receive messages for your business. These APIs are called WhatsApp Cloud APIs.

The WhatsApp Business mobile app is best for small businesses that want a simple chat app to talk with their customers. But if you want anything advanced, like the ability to send thousands of messages at once, send transactional messages for activities like order placement or form submission on your website, manage chats across your sales, marketing, and support teams, and do other advanced usages, then WhatsApp Cloud APIs are the way to go.

Note that when you want to use your phone number with WhatsApp Business Platform, you can opt either for their mobile app or their Cloud API. But you cannot use the same number for both places.

3 Different Ways to Use WhatsApp Cloud APIs

There are three different ways you can use the WhatsApp Cloud APIs for sending and receiving WhatsApp messages.

1. Building a tool in-house

WhatsApp's Cloud APIs are open to all businesses. You can hire some developers to integrate the APIs with your website or CRM tool by custom coding them.

2. Sign up with a Business Service Provider (or BSP)

BSPs are official WhatsApp partners that provide software tools for you to consume these Cloud APIs. They provide you with the software tool for sending and receiving WhatsApp messages, so you do not need to build anything yourself.

One big downside of working with BSPs is that they act as middlemen between you and WhatsApp APIs and charge you a fortune to use their tools. Not only do they charge high monthly fees, but they also charge 10–15% extra on top of WhatsApp's standard per-conversation pricing.

3. Sign up with Wapikon

Wapikon is different as we are not a Business Service Provider. We provide you with a simple-to-use Platform to consume these APIs, but with your own API credentials. You have full control over the setup, usage, and billing of the APIs, and we only charge you a small fee to use our tool.

You get all the features that you get from a BSP, but without the high costs or paying extra on top of WhatsApp's standard per-conversation pricing.