Capacity, Quality Rating, and Messaging Limits
This document covers: Capacity Rate Limits, Quality Rating, Messaging Limits
Capacity rate limiting is imposed on each available API endpoint and will return the appropriate HTTPS error codes (e.g.,
429, 503, etc.) depending on the state of the system.Two forms of capacity rate limiting are currently supported:
- Request rate limiting — Request rate limiting is the throttling of incoming requests on an API endpoint. When the number of requests per second limit is reached, the endpoint will start returning a
429error code.- Beginning with
v2.25.3, the request rate limit for themessagesendpoint is 50 requests per second with bursts allowed up to 150 requests per second. - For versions prior to
v2.25.3and all other endpoints, the request rate limit is 20 requests per second with bursts allowed up to 60 requests per second.
- Concurrent rate limiting — Concurrent rate limiting is the throttling of incoming requests when the Coreapp itself is under heavy load (e.g., job queue size grew too large). At this point, the endpoint will start returning a
503error.
When you hit either of these capacity rate limiting scenarios, you should halt any further requests and slow the pace of your API requests. If you start seeing many capacity rate limit errors, it would be advisable to build a queue on your end to throttle the requests.
Messaging limits determine the maximum number of business-initiated conversations each phone number can start in a rolling 24-hour period. These limits do not apply to user-initiated conversations. A business-initiated conversation starts when the first message is delivered to a customer and ends 24 hours later.
Business phone numbers without a connected status and an approved display name are limited to 250 business-initiated conversations in a rolling 24-hour period. This includes all business phone numbers of an unverified business, since these numbers cannot receive display name approval until the business is verified.
Business phone numbers with a connected status and approved display name can initiate conversations with the following number of 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
Messaging limits are increased or decreased automatically based on your phone number status, phone number quality rating, and how often you initiate conversations with unique customers.
All businesses and phone numbers start with 1K business-initiated conversations with unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period. If you reach your messaging limit, you can start more conversations as soon as one or more active conversations end. For example:
The phone number status, quality rating, and messaging limits for your WhatsApp business account are listed in the Phone Numbers tab in WhatsApp Manager. You can also check this information on the card view of the telephone as well as on the details page.
Each time you initiate a new conversation with a unique customer, WhatsApp will determine if your limit should be increased. This determination is based on the following criteria:
- phone number status is Connected
- phone number quality rating is Medium or High
- Display Name is approved
- account has been at the current messaging limit for at least 48 hours
- in the last 7 days account have initiated X or more conversations with unique customers, where X is the current messaging limit multiplied by 2
If you meet all conditions, WhatsApp will increase your messaging limit immediately.
Messaging limit increased from 1K to 10K in 2 days:
Text | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Business-initiated conversations (new) | 500 | 500 | | | |
Business-initiated conversations in last 7 days | 500* | 1,000 | | | |
Messaging limit | 1K | 10K | | | |
* If the 500th conversation is initiated at 3pm (for example), the messaging limit is increased at 3pm the following day (i.e. 24 hours later).
Messaging limit increased from 1K to 10K in 4 days:
Text | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Business-initiated conversations (new) | 100 | 200 | 200 | 300 | |
Business-initiated conversations in last 7 days | 100 | 300 | 500* | 800 | |
Messaging limit | 1K | 1K | 1K | 10K | |
* If the 500th conversation is initiated at 7pm (for example), the messaging limit is increased at 7pm the following day (i.e. 24 hours later).
Each time you initiate a new conversation with a unique customer, WhatsApp will check your phone number quality rating.
If the rating has been Flagged for the last 7 days, WhatsApp will immediately decrease your messaging limit by one level.
Messaging limits determine how many unique users your business can send messages to, on a daily basis, and it takes at least 5 days for the new number to reach the last tier. You should always analyze phone number quality before sending notifications to twice the current tier reach, so you guarantee you can move to the next tier in a healthy way.
This is an opportunity for business to test with a smaller database to see how customers see this new communication channel you are creating.
Your quality rating is based on how messages have been received by recipients in recent days. It is determined by a combination of quality signals from conversations between businesses and users. Examples include user feedback signals like blocks, reports and the reasons users provide when they block a business.
A message template's Quality Rating can have the following status:
- Active - Quality pending: The message template has yet to receive quality feedback from customers. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers and will be monitored for rating.
- Active - High Quality: The template has received little or no negative customer feedback. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers.
- Active - Medium Quality: The template has received negative feedback from multiple customers but may soon become paused or disabled. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers.
- Active - Low Quality: The template has received negative feedback from multiple customers. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers but are in danger of being paused or disabled soon, so it is recommended that you address the issues that customers are reporting.
Approved message templates start out with a Quality pending rating. If a message template continuously receives negative feedback, it will eventually cause a change in the template status. As long as a message template has an Active status, regardless of the quality rating, it can be sent to customers. However, once a message template's status changes to any other status, it cannot be sent to customers until it becomes active again.
To help your clients create a quality customer experience, review these expectations and best practices with them and include them in your processes:
- Meta requires businesses to get opt-in from customers before initiating a conversation, which can be obtained both on and off WhatsApp
- 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.
- Clearly communicate the value of receiving important updates on WhatsApp. Make the messages highly personalized and useful to users
- Be explicit about what types of messages a customer is opting-in to and honor those customer choices
- Regularly monitor your quality metrics. Be mindful of customer preferences and update communications strategy accordingly, such as message frequency, contacts list etc.
- Provide instructions for how to opt-out of receiving specific messages. For example, include a ‘STOP’ or an ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ button to make it easy for people to control the communication they receive. We’ve made this simple with the marketing opt-out button that businesses can add to their templates.
- Honor customer requests by ensuring opted-out users don’t receive messages from any phone numbers from your business to mitigate risk of customers blocking or reporting your business
Meta constantly monitors user sentiment and feedback shared by the user. If a business’s phone number has a low quality rating for an extended period of time, the phone number is flagged and could be rate limited. If a message template a business sends results in a high enough rate of people blocking or reporting the business, the template will be paused from being sent to more customers until it is updated.
It is important to build and maintain a high quality customer experience on WhatsApp, so that customers can keep using this channel to communicate with your business. To protect users, WhatsApp has a reporting and blocking mechanism. If a user doesn't like the experience they get, they might block or report your business number.
A block or report action against your business keeps you from contacting those users and impacts your phone number reach and the template availability.
To help you keep a high quality experience for your customers, we recommend that you monitor the quality signals to assess how messages are being received by users and act on relevant updates as quickly as possible.
To get notified when a phone number quality status changes, subscribe to the
phone_number_quality_update webhook. You must subscribe to each WhatsApp Business Account you'd like to get the updates.What to watch for: the Flagged status. Flagged status occurs when the quality rating reaches a low state. If the message quality improves to a high or medium state and maintains this for 7 days, your status will return to Connected. If the quality rating doesn't improve, your status will still return to Connected, but you'll be placed in a lower messaging limit tier.
