u/Ok_West333

Works well for indie sellers who like to send OTP / FYI message to their customers on whatsapp & send 200-300 messages a day max. It does NOT use whatsapp API but you need to add Watobot as a linked device. No need to wait for WABA / template approvals etc.

Ban mitigation techniques: every user gets a dedicated Residential IP so that whatsapp server see an IP close to you & rightfully consider it your device. Message from single account is queued so a (accidental) blast of message still gets sent sequentially, minimizing chances of account ban.

Privacy: All your data is encrypted using your auth token so no data theft/selling or impersonation is possible.

Link - https://watobot.xyz .

Code - https://github.com/pocha/mudbot

If you have Whatsapp API access & want to set it up in efficient way minimizing chances of ban, happy to chat. DM me.

Tl;Dr; github - https://github.com/pocha/mudbot . Live - https://watobot.xyz .

Around 7 months back, while pursuing a spirituality course (Sadhanapada) at Isha Yoga Center, I had to setup a roster to notify each of the roommate when is their turn to clean. I setup mudslide, connected my account using QR code & set mudslide command in cron, on an always on laptop I had at my seva (hindi for volunteering). It worked well

After few months, a friend approached me for a similar solution to set daily reminders to a whatsapp group he manage. I said I can set it up on his server but he being non tech, was a bit afraid to touch his setup. So i set it up on one of my vm. While doing so, I had to create a web service to let him create & edit his scheduled messages. I extended it to multi user setup & exposed an api end point so that people could send whatsapp messages through the app. It now started to look like a free SMTP like outgoing messaging hosted app for whatsapp. All this done over a weekend.

I then thought, what if I publicize this & get users. Afterall, there is no free whatsapp messaging api out there. I did have apprehension of whatsapp not liking it, but soon, I discovered bigger issues.

If multiple users sign up, whatsapp will see my server ip as the originating device ip, potentially banning my server & (far worse) blocking their account. I played around a bit to find Residential IP solution from dataImpulse. For 5 USD, it offered 5 GB worth of data transfer. So I implemented it. It had the provision of picking postcode specific ip. I tried to implement it but it isnt the best at the moment. It also increased latency of overall send api but guess that is necessary evil of proxy ips anyway.

I was doing this as a side project & I wanted to make sure none of the users using the app, their data gets compromised because of my mistake. It would have been dangerous specially if mudslide cache of a user gets exposed & someone start impersonating them. So I decided to encrypt the data at rest. I decided to use the auth token of the user to do so, which will prevent even the app host from decrypting. I also decided to encrypt the schedule & logs so that it also encrypts the phone numbers of the users of my user private. I decided to push all the data including user data which is stored in the app directory, as part of the github repo. So now the repo itself acts as the backup.

I thought of putting it up as no kyc whatsapp messaging api & to provide complete privacy, decided to not store user's email either. So when a user request login link on their email, user's directory name is first few characters from one way hash of user's email. The directory is also part of user's auth token so that it can be looked up in O(1) way without needing to store the mapping anywhere.

A friend wanted to use it for some outgoing marketing messages. I told him it isnt the right usecase but he still wanted to try. I decided to implement a user specific queue for all user's messages so that it sends out messages one by one & not blast simultaneously which can potentially cause a ban. The mudslide cache decryption & residential ip route adds a random 10-15 seconds delay which now acts as an unintended advantage. I wanted to create a UI for marketing message broadcast but my friend changed mind by the time I implemented queueing :).

I put it up at https://watobot.xyz . I had a few people signup but less than 10 people connected their whatsapp account so far. Some of it could be fear of their whatsapp account getting stolen, but some could also be because the residential ip ends up picking an ip in same country but a far off region & whatsapp decide not to add the device, forcing user to retry, where they give up.

What do you think are good next steps for this project ?

Repo link - https://github.com/pocha/mudbot . Please star if you like the project. If you are a tech service provider, feel free to fork & set it up on your/client's server to provide messaging as a service, although I would prefer if you use watobot.xyz itself :).

I first started by building https://watobot.xyz when a friend wanted to have a free way to scheduled reminders to a group that he owns. When I was building it, I figured I could as well expose an API end point which will give a free whatsapp messaging API to people, with a constraint, that the message will go out as the user & NOT as a business, as the offering adds itself as user's device & does NOT use the official Whatsapp API endpoints. Good for small businesses or hobby projects where people need a free Whatsapp sending API.

While I built this, I wanted to extend the service to also read messages & probably built a full-fledged whatsapp bot. I was looking for usecases to do so & it struck me that for a long time, I wanted to build FAQ from a group chat where people ask repeated questions as it is very hard to find previous messages in whatsapp. My idea was - if the bot could keep reading the messages, it can update the FAQ on nightly basis.

This hypothesis required 2 things - being able to read whatsapp messages & being able to generate good FAQ. I decided to solve point 2 first. So I built https://watobot.xyz/whatsapp-group-faq/ where you can upload a group's backup chat & get an FAQ out of it. The FAQ generated can be edited so it serves as a good start point. They have an easier search interface & also share option against each item so that someone looking to answer a repeated question, can choose to share the link of the FAQ to also evangelize people to check FAQ before they ask a (repeated) question.

I am bit new to Reddit & was looking for a sub-reddit where people are looking for such a whatsapp solution. I could only find this sub-reddit so decided to ask here anyway. If you happen to use the FAQ generation tool & tell me how you find it & what else you would like to see there, that will be appreciated help.

I have been working on my app Kilvish (website kilvish.com ) for past 10 months or so. The idea goes way back & I have kept pivoting it to a different kind of implementation every year. Thanks to AI tools that I started some final & serious development sometime around Oct 2025.

The idea isn't novel & there are multiple apps out there in the domain. What is specific about Kilvish is that I have taken UPI first approach for importing expense in it. Instead of reading SMS or hooking up your bank (I am not even sure if it is possible in India), you can simply click on 'Share Receipt' once you are done with your UPI transaction & choose Kilvish to send the expense to app.

The inspiration to build Kilvish came to me during Covid era. The newspaper guy & the car wash guy were a became erratic in collecting payments & both my wife & I faced issue remembering when we paid to them last. So I created a whatsapp group of all stakeholders & told my wife to post the screenshot in it once she does the payment (I did the same). The whatsapp group become some kind of ledger for us.

Another issue I faced was - I never had a good visibility of our overall monthly household expense. Wife did some expense, I did some, both of us did expenses which were NOT household (she bought some stuff for her, I paid for something else).

I decided to solve both these problems with Kilvish. You create a tag, share it with others who can now add expense to it & see expenses in it (first problem solved). The tag has aggregate sum of expense (overall & monthly) so that solves the 2nd problem.

I called it tag & not category because you could attach multiple tag to an expense (to make it participate in multiple categories). So you do NOT need to import same expense again in different groups/categories.

When I showed the app to my neighbours, they demanded it should be like Splitwise as they use that for their monthly account settling. So I decided to build expense splitting feature as well.

My next aim is to implement data encryption so that only you & people you have shared the tag with, can see the data. As of now, I have implemented Role Based Access Control so nobody outside the group can access data. But I as an admin can still the data. Although I have kept the table names & ids in a way that it makes it hard for even admins to figure out what content belongs to whom, but it is still doable.

Now coming to the ask. While my wife & I have been using the app for months, I decided to now put it live on Google Play Store, only to figure that I need 12 people to use my app for 14 days for Google Play to let me make the app public. Anybody here who relates to the problems & like to use the app to solve it for them ? You can DM me your Android gmail & I will add you to closed beta list & pass the link for you to join the beta program.