One WhatsApp inbox your whole team can work

• The 24-hour window is shown before you type, not after Meta refuses. On the official platform a free-text reply is only possible inside the window the customer’s own message opened, and it is measured from their last message — your replies do not extend it. The composer says so, and offers a template when it has closed. Meta’s own error for this arrives after the attempt and is accurate and useless.
• "Needs a reply" is derived from the message, not from a nightly job. The waiting clock starts when an inbound message is written and clears when a reply actually reaches WhatsApp — not when somebody typed one. An automated reply, a bot answer or a campaign send does not clear it, because none of those is somebody having dealt with the customer.
• An overdue thread is escalated once, not every five minutes. The reminder is claimed against the exact moment the wait began, so one waiting cycle produces one notification to the assignee — or, if nobody is assigned, to the number’s owner. A tool that notifies on a state rather than a transition sends 288 notifications a day and is muted on the second day.
• Read state goes both ways. Blue ticks reach the customer when your team reads the chat. And when an operator reads a conversation on their own handset, our unread count goes down — which sounds obvious and is the single most common complaint about integrations that do not do it.
• Two people cannot quietly answer the same customer. If a colleague has replied since you opened the thread, you are asked before your message goes.
• Voice notes are real voice notes. A browser records WebM; WhatsApp needs Ogg/Opus. The audio is re-packaged in the browser without re-encoding, and if that cannot be done the file is sent as an audio attachment and labelled as one rather than arriving as a voice note that will not play.
• A failed message says why, in words. Meta’s numeric codes are translated: no payment method on the WhatsApp Business Account, the window has closed, the recipient is not on WhatsApp. The message stays in the thread so it can be retried.
• Empty, failed and loading are three different states. A failed read renders an error with a retry, never an empty list — "a 403 is not an empty list" is a rule in this codebase, because telling a customer their data is gone when the request merely timed out is worse than any spinner.

The shared inbox is in the lowest tier, from $50 per connected number per month, with your whole team included. There is no seat charge, so adding a colleague costs nothing.

Meta charges for messages separately, directly to you. Inside the 24-hour window a reply is a service message; from 1 October 2026 the first 1,000 service messages a month per number are free. What Meta charges.

• No email notifications yet. There is no email delivery in the product. Notifications reach you in the app, and on a Bitrix24 portal in Bitrix24 as well. We would rather say that than ship a setting that silently does nothing.
• Group chats do not exist on the official platform. Meta’s Cloud API has no group messaging at all — an absence in the interface, not a setting, so no vendor on the official transport can offer it. The QR option can.
• WhatsApp sometimes withholds the customer’s phone number. On QR-linked numbers Meta is progressively moving accounts to opaque identifiers, and for a migrated account the contact’s number is simply not sent to a linked device, for ever. Re-pairing does not reverse it — we have tested that, at a customer’s cost. The official Cloud API returns the number properly, and that is a real argument for it.
• A media carousel always sends the number of cards it was created with. Meta’s rule, not ours. Several template shapes also render differently on WhatsApp Web and desktop than on a phone; the template editor says which.