WhatsApp: Messaging Limits and Tier system
Note: The messaging limit tiers determine how many users you can send templates to on a 24-hour rolling period. This includes new conversations as well as existing conversations with users.
In this article:
- WhatsApp: Messaging Limits and Tier system
- How do the tiers work?
- How do I know my messaging limit tier?
- Increasing Your Limit
- Examples
- Decreasing Your Limit
- ℹ️ Please keep in mind the following:
Please keep in mind, the messaging limit does not limit the number of templates your organization can send, just the number of users you can send to. It only applies to template messages and not to your responses to user-initiated messages or session messages.
How do the tiers work?
The phone number tier of your WhatsApp API account will determine your messaging limit - the number of Contacts an account can message. There are five tiers a phone number inside a WABA can reach, including:
- Unverified Trial Tier: Send messages to 50 unique Contacts in a rolling 24-hour period.
- Tier 1: Send template messages to 1K Contacts in a rolling 24-hour period
- Tier 2: Send template messages to 10K unique Contacts in a rolling 24-hour period
- Tier 3: Send template messages to 100K Contacts in a rolling 24-hour period
- Tier 4: Send template messages to unlimited unique Contacts in a rolling 24-hour period
How do I know my messaging limit tier?
Every channel starts at Tier 1.
Unfortunately, we are unable to show your tier in the Dashboard interface, as WhatsApp does not yet provide a suitable API for this feature. Still, you can always consult this in the WhatsApp Manager interface, but you can review this by following the steps in this article:
The best approach for sending templates to more than 1,000 users is to gradually roll out your send over the course of a week. Especially when you start using templates for the first time.
In summary, according to Meta's policies, a channel will be upgraded to the next tier if:
- Its quality rating is not low, and
- The cumulative amount of users it sends notifications to add up to twice its current messaging limit within a 7-day period
Once the business reaches this threshold, it will be moved to the next tier. The minimum amount of time that this upgrade can occur is after 48 hours when the business sends messages up to their current limit daily.
Increasing Your Limit
Each time you initiate a new conversation with a unique customer we will determine if your limit should be increased. This determination is based on the following criteria:
- your phone number status is Connected
- your phone number quality rating is Medium or High
- in the last 7 days, you have initiated X or more conversations with unique customers, where X is your current messaging limit divided by 2
If you meet all conditions, we will increase your messaging limit by one level in 24 hours.
Examples
Messaging limit increased from 1K to 10K in 2 days:
*If the 500th conversation is initiated at 3 pm (for example), the messaging limit is increased at 3 pm the following day (i.e. 24 hours later).
Messaging limit increased from 1K to 10K in 4 days:
*If the 500th conversation is initiated at 7 pm (for example), the messaging limit is increased at 7 pm the following day (i.e. 24 hours later).
Decreasing Your Limit
Each time you initiate a new conversation with a unique customer we will check your phone number quality rating. If the rating has been Low for the last 7 days, we will immediately decrease your messaging limit by one level.
ℹ️ Please keep in mind the following:
- We cannot change or request a change to your tier to Meta, they will deny this request as it is against their policy to increase the rate limit for a given channel manually.
- Even if you meet the message volume criteria, your number may be prevented from moving to the next tier if the quality rating for your number is low (red).
- Given the dependency to send templates to users twice your tier limit, the earliest an upgrade can occur is after 2 days, however, we cannot guarantee this will appear before the 7-day period.
- Those messages will fail if you try and send more templates than your tier allows.