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What are WhatsApp sender message limits and quality rating?

Question

What are WhatsApp sender message limits and quality rating? 

Product

Programmable Messaging 

Answer

Scaling with WhatsApp

Once you have successfully registered a WhatsApp Sender on Twilio, there are some important considerations you should keep in mind when scaling your Twilio WhatsApp messaging application:

  1. Meta imposes Messaging Limits on the number of business-initiated conversations that each WhatsApp Sender may start within a 24-hour period.
  2. Each Sender is also assigned a Quality Rating once it has started sending messages, and this Quality Rating can affect the Messaging Limits applied to the WhatsApp Sender.
  3. If the Sender reaches the Messaging Limit, more conversations can be started as soon as one or more active conversations end. If you exceed the limit for your tier, your messages will be undelivered with error 63018.

Note: A WhatsApp Sender’s Messaging Limits are not the same as a WhatsApp Sender’s Throughput, which is measured in Messages per Second (MPS). Default MPS for WhatsApp Senders is 80 MPS. Media and Text messages are despatched from the same queue.

We recommend that you keep these limits in mind when your use case requires sending business-initiated messages to a large number of recipients. You should plan on gradually rolling out your implementation to large amounts of end users over the course of a week at minimum.

Twilio is unable to change a Sender's Quality Rating nor influence/request that customers be moved between Messaging Limit tiers. In addition, WhatsApp will not start a number on a higher tier or manually increase the limit.

 

WhatsApp Messaging Limits

Here are the five Messaging Limit tiers:

  • 250 business-initiated conversations with unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period.
  • 1K business-initiated conversations with unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period.
  • 10K business-initiated conversations with unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period.
  • 100K business-initiated conversations with unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period.
  • An unlimited number of business-initiated conversations in a rolling 24-hour period.

Immediately after registering a number with WhatsApp, it will start at the first tier of 250 business-initiated conversations within a rolling 24-hour period. This first tier has special requirements before it can be upgraded to the 1k tier:

  • Businesses must complete Meta’s Business Verification and have a verified status.
  • Once verified, some businesses determined by Meta to have higher risk will need to send messages at the 250 Messaging Limit to prove trustworthiness to Meta.
  • Once these steps are complete, the WhatsApp Sender’s Display Name will automatically be reviewed by Meta within 24 hours. Once it’s approved, the Sender will be automatically upgraded to the 1K tier.

Once on the 1K tier, Meta will continue to monitor message volume as well as quality (see below), and will automatically move customers between tiers based on the total number of business-initiated conversations started during the past 7 days.

If, within the past 7 days, a WhatsApp Sender has initiated business conversations with half the unique customers of the per day limit, and maintains a good "quality rating" from WhatsApp, that Sender will automatically be moved to the next tier 24 hours later.

Please note, a Sender may be prevented from moving to the next rate tier, or even moved down a tier, if WhatsApp's internal "quality rating" for the number is low. Twilio is not able to influence this rating or surface it to customers in Console. See "Quality rating" below for more details.

Example 1: A Twilio WhatsApp Sender’s Display Name is approved and upgraded to the 1K Messaging Limit tier. On day 1, the Sender starts 500 business conversations to unique customers by 3pm. The message limit for the Sender is raised to 10,000 unique customers by day 2 at 3pm.

Example 2: A Twilio WhatsApp Sender begins by being able to initiate business conversations to 1000 unique customers per day. On day 1, the Sender starts 100 business conversations to unique customers. On day 2, the Sender starts another 300 business conversations to unique customers. On day 3, the Sender starts another 100 business conversations to unique customers by 3pm. This brings the total number of unique business conversations in the last 7 days to 500. The message limit for the Sender is raised to 10,000 unique customers by day 4 at 3pm.

This rate limiting does NOT apply to messages sent in response to a user-initiated message within a 24-hour period.


Quality Rating

Because WhatsApp encrypts messages, it relies on user feedback to measure quality of messages. WhatsApp uses this feedback to track an internal "quality rating" for senders that can effect how users are able to move between rate limiting tiers. Factors including the frequency rate of "report spam" and "block" on your sender may influence the quality rating." Senders with the Low quality rating may not be eligible to move up in rate limiting tiers.

In order to maintain high quality, WhatsApp recommends the following:

  • Make sure messages follow the WhatsApp Business Policy.
  • Only send messages to users who have opted into receiving messages from your business.
  • Make the messages highly personalized and useful to users. Avoid sending open-ended welcome or introductory messages.
  • Be mindful of messaging frequency; avoid sending customers too many messages a day. Be thoughtful of informational messages, optimizing for content and length.

A low Quality rating can result in a number being prevented from moving to a higher rate tier, or even in some cases being downgraded to a lower rate tier.

For more details, see Capacity and Messaging Limits (developers.facebook.com).

Viewing a Sender's Current Quality and Messaging Limits in Console

To view a WhatsApp Sender’s current Messaging Limit and Quality Rating:

  1. Navigate to the WhatsApp Sender page in the Twilio Console
  2. Quality and Messaging Limit will be visible in the list of Senders
  3. If either value is listed as “Unavailable”, this means one of two things:
    1. The Sender has not yet been registered
    2. The Sender has not sent a sufficient amount of messages recently enough for Meta to assign a Messaging Limit and/or Quality Rating

Fetch a Sender's Current Quality and Messaging Limits via API

You can use the Sender's API to fetch details such as Quality and Messaging Limit programmatically. See here for more details.

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