WhatsApp Business Chatbot

About WhatsApp Business Chatbot

WhatsApp Business Chatbot is Metacubic's line for sales and support assistants running on WhatsApp, connected to your catalogue and order system, handing over to a person with the full conversation attached when it should.

The reason this needs its own page rather than sharing one with the website assistant is that WhatsApp is not a neutral channel. Meta sets rules about when you may message somebody, what you may send, and what it costs. Those rules shape the design more than any decision about the assistant itself.

Everything below about platform behaviour comes from Meta's own WhatsApp Business Platform documentation rather than from a vendor summary.

What is the 24-hour customer service window?

When a WhatsApp user messages your business, that opens a 24 hour customer service window. Inside it you can send ordinary messages freely, and Meta does not charge for those non-template messages.

When the window closes, which happens 24 hours after the user last messaged you, you can no longer send ordinary messages at all. The only thing that can reach somebody outside a window is a template message.

This single rule decides most of the architecture. An assistant that answers people who contacted you is cheap and simple. A system that reaches out first is a different product with different costs and different approval requirements.

What are message templates and why do they exist?

A template is a pre-written message structure that Meta reviews before you may send it. Templates are the only message type deliverable outside an open customer service window, so anything proactive depends on them.

Each template is categorised as marketing, utility or authentication, and that category affects what you pay. Since 1 July 2025 Meta charges per delivered template message rather than per conversation. Utility templates delivered inside an open customer service window are free.

Templates also carry a quality rating based on user feedback and read rates. Meta can pause or disable templates that repeatedly attract negative feedback, which means a poorly judged campaign does not just perform badly, it can cost you the ability to send that template at all.

Which countries and message types are restricted?

Meta's documentation states that WhatsApp does not currently deliver marketing template messages to users with United States phone numbers, meaning numbers with a plus one dialling code and a US area code. Attempts return an error.

If your customers are mainly in the United States, that rules out WhatsApp marketing outreach entirely. Inbound support and service conversations are a separate matter, but any plan built around proactive promotional messaging to US numbers will not work.

Meta also applies per-user limits on how many marketing templates an individual receives, adjusted to their recent engagement. Those per-user limits are noted as not currently active in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Japan or South Korea.

These rules change. Check the current position against Meta's own documentation before committing budget rather than trusting any page, including this one.

Does business verification matter?

Template capacity depends on business verification. Meta's documentation states that an unverified business portfolio limits each WhatsApp Business Account to 250 message templates, while a verified portfolio with at least one approved display name raises that to 6,000 per account.

For most businesses running a single assistant, 250 is not a constraint. It becomes one for multi-language operations, since each language needs its own template, and for anyone running many campaign variants.

Verification is worth starting early regardless, because it gates other things and takes time that is easier to spend before a launch date exists.

What does Metacubic build on top of the platform?

Metacubic lists WhatsApp among the channels it deploys assistants on, alongside web chat and Messenger, with the stated deliverables being a trained assistant, a knowledge base built from your real content, lead capture wired into your CRM, email or a sheet, analytics on conversations and leads, and guardrails on answers.

Handover works the same way as on the web assistant. Meta's platform routes the conversation to a person with full context rather than restarting it.

The published position on accuracy is that replies are grounded in your content through retrieval with citations, and that an unsure assistant hands off rather than guessing.

Who should choose something else?

If your customers are in the United States and your goal is promotional outreach, the platform will not deliver it. Use email or the Website Support Chatbot instead.

If your audience browses your site rather than messaging, the web assistant reaches them where they already are, and costs less to run because there are no template charges at all.

If you want an assistant that reads live records such as order status or account balances, that requires integration work beyond a documentation-based assistant, and belongs with Metacubic AI.

And if you are hoping to send bulk promotional messages to a purchased list, this is the wrong platform and the wrong company. Template quality ratings, pausing and per-user limits exist specifically to stop that, and the account you damage is your own.