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Comment by joshwarwick15 | Hacker News Reader

(Caveat I’m the founder of https://wassist.app - The WhatsApp Agent Platform)

Please be very careful using this tool to automate your WhatsApp - if you send too many messages, too quickly, you are going to get banned.

This is NOT an officially supported api by WhatsApp and the risk of ban is relatively high

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The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app.

As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.

...until Meta decides they want to offer this kind of thing themselves and ban everyone else. Building your SaaS on top of someone else's SaaS is always a gamble, especially if said product is directly sold to users already and not a pure b2b intermediate.

Meta already has a whatsapp api product

For spammers.

They don't have one for regular people who want to do regular end-user computation.

Companies in spain use it for legitimate reasons, so its more a lack of usage which makes spam the only usage?

I consider marketing use to be spam, and this is what the API is primarily meant for.

I understand that WhatsApp is kinda special in that it effectively replaced SMS in some parts of the world, but IMO this needs to be looked at through the lens of other Meta effort. The same is the case with Facebook/Messenger, and has been since before WhatsApp has been a (Meta) thing - they offer multiple different official ways to support spamming users and tricking them to buy stuff, but may the Lord have mercy on you should you want to create an auto-responder or "save to calendar" script and hook it up to your personal account.

Who mentioned marketing? It's used for package tracking, order updates, bookings and so on where I live.

Not where I live, presumably not in the US, and it doesn't look like the main use case emphasized in the developer/integration documentation.

That seems a but pessimistic. A few companies use it for customer service, like ime Adidas Germany [0] (they handled an exchange for me once on there). It is effectively just another customer support line like a chat portal on a website.

[0]: https://www.adidas.de/en/help/contact-us

I personally find the almost absence of spam on WhatsApp a big success story for it. Think about how much Spam still hits your email inbox (and nobody knows how much is filtered away before it does).

I totally understand why they try and make it hard for integration to happen. When compared to classic SMS, the fact that you need to start a conversation with a preapproved template means that they have a way to control casual interactions.

They're already outright banning many OpenClaw usecases via their official API: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/whatssapp-changes-its-term...

Since recently Meta offers this as per European Union mandate (Digital Markets Act, DMA). For both Whatsapp and Facebook messaging. [0]

Now there are a lot of implementation requirements, basically forcing you to have some kind of messaging provider. Therefore difficult to apply for an open source solution. However there is such an interface.

[0] https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...

Personal use is all fun and games until your little beeper goes into a loop.

Someone who previously helped a project Barista/instagrabber, you should be wary of it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240527132615/https://austinhua...

That's quite... something.

I (almost) don't use any Meta products, but this just convinces me that I should stay away from it as far as possible.

Exactly, "automate your WhatsApp/Signal/..." sounds like "use XMPP for that use case", that's my go-to for bots and notifications, it works as well if not better, and I sleep better at night.

Do you know a way i can use to trigger call to self for notification purpose? like site down notification via whatsapp or telegram call?

just so we know the consequences - is ban permanent? is there an appeals processes?

When banned it'll give you means to reach out to support, you can claim ignorance and get unbanned. I've gone through this, having done some whatsapp automation myself, YMMV though.

very helpful, thanks. good on WA for providing actually working support. people will fuck up when testing legitimate stuff, it happens.

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