u/Ok_West333

I recently got approached by a Doctor who could build a whatsapp chatbot all by himself. Thanks to Claude & his determination :). Not only he was able to deploy his chatbot app on Cloudflare servers, but what baffled me, was he is able to get Whatsapp Business API access .. for free.

So far, I used to think that you can NOT get access to Whatsapp Business API without going through a Tech Provider. At least, that is how it was few years back when Whatsapp had NOT exposed their APIs. But when he told me, he was able to get access, attached a card to his Meta account & his chatbot is now running fine & answering questions of his patients/leads, I was a bit baffled.

Well, the reason he had approached me was that his number is NOT working on his app anymore & he had figured he needed Coexistence. He was reasonably convinced that he need a 3rd party (he explicitly said 360dialogie, Wati etc). I figured he is talking about Tech Provider. I thought, this can't be hard & there must be a toggle that need activating. So I spent 5 full days researching & figured, he was right. Meta hides coexistence behind Tech Provider app.

This is what I figured.

• Register a Business Portfolio - This is the start point. You can register one even without a registered business. You do NOT need business verification if you are going to message less than 250 clients in a day. Add the phone number to 'Whatsapp Account' on the portfolio by choosing 'Create a new Whatsapp Business Account' (aka WABA).
• Create Meta app under the Portfolio - This is the longest part. You need to choose 'Connect with Customers using Whatsapp' & your business Portfolio. This is quick. But then comes the long part of satisfying all the usecases. You need to provide callback url from your chatbot to which Meta will send the incoming messages. You need to specify what all fields you need in the response. You can then create access token in the app which you can use to send outgoing messages.

That is it. Your number now has API access. The challenge is - you can NOT add this number to Whatsapp Business app. For that, you need Coexistence.

So I decided to build an app that will help people get Coexistence, only to realize I have now become a Meta Tech Provider :). The app is still under approval though. I also figured that if you go via a Tech Provider, the onboarding to API process is just a few clicks. The steps are also different. You choose the phone number first & then Business Portfolio (or create one if it does not exist). You do NOT have to go through whole Meta App creation process but it automatically gets created for you as part of onboarding. This process is called 'Embedded Signup'.

The detailed step with screenshot on how you get API access for free are documented at https://watobot.com/how-to/get-whatsapp-api-for-free.html . If there is something wrong in there, do let me know. If you like to ask anything, I will be happy to answer.

P.S. I am thinking of creating a command line script or a chat app that will ask relevant questions to user & get them the API access token, without they needing to navigate the Meta maze. Maybe make it available for one time payment. Do you think such a thing has a value ? Or people would like to stick to Tech Providers / BSPs anyway ?

In the past, I was part of Overlanding community & managed a few groups of people overlanding in Pamir, Russia & Central Asia. There was always the problem of people not leaving the community once their travel is over, to make space for new members.

Recently, I being part of reasonably big Indian motorbiking community - BangaloreBikes - the mods there started to face similar problem. Now that I am not traveling & got good amount of time in hand, decided to solve this problem. So I built Watomod - a free Whatsapp Community Moderator. How it works video is attached.

Whatsapp is notoriously bad in providing ways to manage communities. You cant gatekeep effectively (facebook & google groups allowed you set specific questions that people answer for you to let them in), there are no ban protection techniques & there is no way to surface inactive members. So these are the things I decided to tackle in Watomod. It just has the first feature live.

The closest app I could find that does things related to managing Communities (actually just Groups) is Periskope. But it does not have a free tier. But it also lacked the features I was looking at. Anyway, it was fun to build this.

Happy to answer questions. If you know people in your circle who struggle to manage big Whatsapp Communities, do point them to the tool.

When I built Watobot, as a user acquisition strategy, I wanted to build plugins. I remember reading about story of Appointy (a appointment booking SaaS from a tier 2 city in India) & how they got good adoption by building Wordpress plugin for it.

A quick chat with Gemini & Claude revealed some platforms where a free Whatsapp messaging plugin could be useful - Woocomerce (Wordpress), Shopify etc - where the sellers would like to inform the buyer of their recent purchase using Whatsapp message. It also recommended building plugin for Calendly, Typeform etc. Further probing revealed that while there are multiple offerings of free unofficial Whatsapp API providers in the e-commerce plugin space, there were none for Calendly, Typeform etc. The source of plugins for these are Zapier, Make & IFTTT . The mistake I did is to trust what these AI tools said without diving deep. I spent a few days building a Zapier Zap for Watobot specifically to be used with Calendly. After clearning all the requirements, when I submitted my Zap to be published, Zapier folks came back saying they can not approve an unofficial Whatsapp API provider Zap on their platform.

It then became clear to me as to why there are no other unofficial API plugins on Zapier, Make etc. Apparently GreenAPI folks had a Zap but it showed disabled. So that pretty much became end of story for it.

Coincidentally, I got approached by someone on Linkedin on the same day. They were offering career counselling & had a nice Calendly calendar for someone to book a time with them. My Zapier Zap although would not see the light of the day, but Zapier gives you a private link which you can send to people & they could use it. I asked the person if they like their Calendly calendar hooked with their Whatsapp & they agreed. Then hit the second bummer. Apparently, Calendly exposed webhooks only in their paid plan. I am not sure if anyone in India actually uses paid Calendly calendars. I thanked him for his time & told him I will get back.

I went back to figuring out what can I do for him. Not sure how, but I got to know that a Calendly calendar embedded in website can help me out through a hack. Apparently, Calendly emits a posthook event which the parent website where the calendar is embedded, can capture & that can act as a webhook. So I decided to build an integration to Watobot using that. Took me like another 2 days & the integration got ready. I reached out to the same person & we were able to connect his Calendly calendar in like 10 minutes.

Well, I look back & it is not a much of win because the whole purpose of these platform listing was to get user acquisition. But then, it is also clear to me that no platform would host a plugin of a service that violates ToS of another popular service :). So I decided to live with it.

While the plan is to launch plugins for Shopify & Woocommerce (there are no completely free whatsapp messaging apis out there either), I thought of just announcing this plugin here.

P.S. Watobot does violate Whatsapp ToS but it is not illegal to use. I had earlier done a post on this sub-reddit itself announcing Watobot & how it is a good option for someone who is looking to send under 100 messages a day programatically. I will be putting a link where I have compared such unofficial API offerings & how at Watobot I have implemented a lot of ban protection technique. Even official Whatsapp API lets people send 250 messages a day without verification, which (kind of roughly) translate to the idea that Whatsapp treat that kind of message numbers as personal messaging limit.

Also, if you connect Watobot with Calendly, you would probably get max 10 calendar bookings a day. Sending 10 messages programatically will surely NOT get your account banned :). I can say that with lot of assurance. Link to the integration in the comment.

I developed an unofficial Whatsapp messaging (only outgoing) API for indie sellers/marketers who might not have bandwidth to register for Whatsapp Business API & complete the checklist items there. I kept the service totally free as it is just outgoing messages cost me minimal money to maintain (9 USD for server & 5 USD for Residential IP). Having said that, I put good engineering practices to ensure user's Whatsapp creds are encrypted in zero knowledge way (even I can't read them) so that user's account is safe, even if the server get access in an unauthorized way.

I got interest from a friend who wanted to integrate his Calendly calendar to send a Whatsapp message on new booking, to the prospect. I thought a Zap would be a good way to build this. After completely building, I hit two roadblocks

• Strict Zapier compliance will not allow the unofficial Whatsapp API integration to go live as it violates Whatsapp ToS
• Bigger bummer - free Calendly plan does NOT expose webhooks, so for user to use it, they need to upgrade their Calendly plan.

I understand the paid Calendly plan bottleneck is Calendly specific. But the first point still remain & Zapier would probably never publish it. Should I look at alternative platforms to publish ? Should I completely ditch the idea as no platform would let me publish integration that violates ToS of Whatsapp ?

Zap link if someone wants to see it in action - https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/245041/b4f6fe532f7308728843fb8dbeb6cc0b/

I have built a free Whatsapp messaging hosted service & got approached by a friend who wanted to send Whatsapp message to their prospect on a meeting booked via Calendly. I thought, this should be straight forward to build using Zapier. In-fact I built a private Zap, but during integration, we figured that Calendly free tier does NOT allow for webhooks. I could have asked him to upgrade to paid Calendly plan but I took it as a challenge & after few prompts, figured that it can be achieved through minimal code writing.

This work around require you to have a website where you have embedded Calendly calendar via inserting the code snippet Calendly provides. You need to add below code snippet on your web page.

function isCalendlyEvent(e) {

return e.origin === "https://calendly.com" && e.data && e.data.event && e.data.event.indexOf("calendly.") === 0;

}

window.addEventListener("message", function(e) {

if (!isCalendlyEvent(e) || e.data.event !== "calendly.event_scheduled") return;

fetch("${API_END_POINT}", {

method: "POST",

headers: { "x-calendly-key": "${apiKey}", "Content-Type": "application/json" },

body: JSON.stringify({

event_uri: e.data.payload.event.uri,

invitee_uri: e.data.payload.invitee.uri

})

}).catch(function(){});

});

So Calendly emit events & in this case, the event name event_scheduled is caught & API call is being done . Using this workaround, I could create Calendly to Whatsapp message sending for free Calendly tier.

Note that the event data payload (e.data.payload), does NOT contain form fields. They need to be fetched from invitee.uri but for that, you would need PAT of calendar owner, or need to create Calendly oAuth application. So it is definitely some amount of work that can only be done by someone who is reasonably techie.

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.