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Curnelious
Curnelious

Reputation: 1

Can you use WhatsApp API For Business to verify users?

When you begin your business using Twillio for sms verification is pretty expensive, I was looking for a free/very cheap service for the beginning.

I can see that Facebook provides - Whatsapp business API and it's unclear if you can already use it to send messages as an individual developer. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/

I can see that Twillio also have a Whatsapp API which costs money.

Is there a way to send Whatsapp messages today ?

Is there other affordable choice to verify new users by sms ?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 717

Answers (2)

Gregory Magarshak
Gregory Magarshak

Reputation: 2217

First of all, in October 2024, Telegram launched a much cheaper and more secure alternative to SMS for verifying phone numbers (flat rate of 1 cent per account if it us on Telegram)

https://core.telegram.org/gateway

For a small community, I could run WhatsApp Web version off my personal account, and have Javascript detect incoming messages and parse them. But WhatsApp isn’t really designed for doing this at scale and could ban you. Until then, though, you could give the user a choice of sending a generated message to your own WhatsApp.

As a side note, I recommend having the site not verify phone numbers since sending SMS is expensive anyway. Use WebAuthn for authentication, and use something else for notifications, like Web Push and Telegram Bots

It’s free to deliver these notifications through Mozilla’s or Telegram’s servers and it can scale much better. For platforms where Web Push is not available, for example, just have a link to start a conversation with your bot on Telegram. And same with WhatsApp (though WhatsApp bot API does cost something.) Send along a custom token in the text to associate the Telegram or WhatsApp user to your user on your site. Forget the Telegram login widget, entering phone numbers is too much friction.

Upvotes: 0

mszmurlo
mszmurlo

Reputation: 1339

There are few Whatsapp non officials API like for example this one or this one. I'm actually also interested in using Whatsapp for sending authentication codes so I'm "collecting" the links for the moment without testing so far. Be careful: it's said quite often that Whatapp is very smart at detecting and blacklisting non regugar usage...

I was also looking at more industrial solutions with Google's firebase or Facebook's account kit. They might be a good alternative yet the pricing model is not crystal clear for me.

Upvotes: 1

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