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.
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 not "richer countries", unless none exist in Europe or Asia. SMS has only kept its primacy for text communication in North America. Also note the RoW has never had to pay to receive SMS.
But NB even where messaging apps are defacto norms, most of the confirmation and verification for businesses remains via SMS.
Europe is in a weird middle-ground where WhatsApp is still dominant for person-to-person messaging. Not only was SMS costly back when WhatsApp emerged, users are also split 50/50 between Apple and Android, and SMS between them wasn't nearly as good as Whatsapp for the longest time. But WhatsApp Business is not a big thing. Of course that's vastly overgeneralizing, local differences exist, Europe is a big continent. But I mostly see SMS for transactional messages, and platforms like Instagram DMs for actual two-way communication
Interestingly enough, Instagram has none of this weird pricing stuff on their messaging API, despite being run by the same overlords
Fair points, the geography/margin angle is real. Two bits of nuance:
In a lot of those "poorer" markets WhatsApp isn't cheap-SMS, it's the actual commerce channel. People browse, ask and pay through it (India, Brazil, Indonesia, MENA), so even on thin per-message margins the volume and conversion are way higher than email/SMS ever hit there.
In richer markets it's still dominant for messaging across most of Europe and LatAm, RCS is still fragmented (Apple only just added it, carrier support is uneven), and email open rates are a fraction of WhatsApp's. So I'd push back a bit on "everyone settles on email/SMS."
I left WA in 2019, while the business api program was still very early, but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good. SMS pricing varies wildly by destination country, sometimes by destination network.
Skimming the page, also note that the quoted prices are for marketting messages, other types of messages are much less expensive.
> but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good
People switched to whatsapp because:
1. It was free unlike SMS
2. It was ubiquitously available like SMS (unlike BBM)
3. It was genuinely a good product.
This feels like Whatsapp (Meta) is rug pulling the users once everyone has moved to Whatsapp, almost analogous to what Uber did. Drive Taxis out of business with predatory pricing, and then increase the prices.
As a whatsapp user, I am quite happy that marketing messages are expensive. Puts a price on spam, which means I get less of it. If they want to send me something actually useful that usually falls into one of the other much cheaper categories
Would be nice if there was an easier way to get an API to message a small number of people though, without the ceremony meant for businesses that want to message thousands or millions
For SMS, the access to a specific consumer is often gated by a monopoly (that user’s telco provider) so they get to charge whatever they like. Therefore you see the variance (the greediness of individual telco). When WhatsApp join in the business messaging game, they want to maintain good relationship with the telcos and they also like the sweet margins they see they are making there.
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.
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.
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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 not "richer countries", unless none exist in Europe or Asia. SMS has only kept its primacy for text communication in North America. Also note the RoW has never had to pay to receive SMS.
But NB even where messaging apps are defacto norms, most of the confirmation and verification for businesses remains via SMS.
Europe is in a weird middle-ground where WhatsApp is still dominant for person-to-person messaging. Not only was SMS costly back when WhatsApp emerged, users are also split 50/50 between Apple and Android, and SMS between them wasn't nearly as good as Whatsapp for the longest time. But WhatsApp Business is not a big thing. Of course that's vastly overgeneralizing, local differences exist, Europe is a big continent. But I mostly see SMS for transactional messages, and platforms like Instagram DMs for actual two-way communication
Interestingly enough, Instagram has none of this weird pricing stuff on their messaging API, despite being run by the same overlords
Fair points, the geography/margin angle is real. Two bits of nuance:
In a lot of those "poorer" markets WhatsApp isn't cheap-SMS, it's the actual commerce channel. People browse, ask and pay through it (India, Brazil, Indonesia, MENA), so even on thin per-message margins the volume and conversion are way higher than email/SMS ever hit there.
In richer markets it's still dominant for messaging across most of Europe and LatAm, RCS is still fragmented (Apple only just added it, carrier support is uneven), and email open rates are a fraction of WhatsApp's. So I'd push back a bit on "everyone settles on email/SMS."
WhatsApp is getting expensive as hell.
Yeah, the July 2025 shift to per-message billing made marketing way pricier. The country spread is wild too, India is ~$0.0094/msg vs Germany ~$0.124
I left WA in 2019, while the business api program was still very early, but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good. SMS pricing varies wildly by destination country, sometimes by destination network.
Skimming the page, also note that the quoted prices are for marketting messages, other types of messages are much less expensive.
> but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good
People switched to whatsapp because:
1. It was free unlike SMS 2. It was ubiquitously available like SMS (unlike BBM) 3. It was genuinely a good product.
This feels like Whatsapp (Meta) is rug pulling the users once everyone has moved to Whatsapp, almost analogous to what Uber did. Drive Taxis out of business with predatory pricing, and then increase the prices.
As a whatsapp user, I am quite happy that marketing messages are expensive. Puts a price on spam, which means I get less of it. If they want to send me something actually useful that usually falls into one of the other much cheaper categories
Would be nice if there was an easier way to get an API to message a small number of people though, without the ceremony meant for businesses that want to message thousands or millions
For SMS, the access to a specific consumer is often gated by a monopoly (that user’s telco provider) so they get to charge whatever they like. Therefore you see the variance (the greediness of individual telco). When WhatsApp join in the business messaging game, they want to maintain good relationship with the telcos and they also like the sweet margins they see they are making there.
I mean surely this was always going to happen? A fixed fee just means less frequent users subsidising everyone else.
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.
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Flagging for clear AI slop
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