WhatsApp Broadcast That Reaches Your Whole List

A broadcast list is a saved group of contacts in the WhatsApp Business app that you can message all at once, with each person receiving it as a private chat. A list holds a limited number of contacts, and only people who have saved your number will actually receive the message. On the Official WhatsApp Business API the equivalent is a contact group or a filter, with neither of those two restrictions.

It depends which one you are using, and these are two separate limits. In the free WhatsApp Business app, one broadcast list holds a fixed maximum, so a bigger audience means building several lists and sending the same message repeatedly. On the Official WhatsApp Business API there is no per-list cap. What applies instead is your Meta messaging limit: how many unique customers you can start a conversation with in a rolling 24 hours, a tier that rises automatically while your quality rating stays healthy. Meta publishes the current figures and revises them periodically, so check Meta’s messaging limits documentation for today’s numbers.

Six things, and the contact cap is only the first of them.

	Free Business app	Official WhatsApp Business API
Contacts per broadcast	Fixed cap per list	No per-list cap. Governed by your Meta messaging tier
Must they save your number?	Yes	No
Personalisation	Same text for everyone	Template variables per contact
Delivery reporting	Ticks on your screen	Sent, delivered, read, replied, failed
Scheduling	No	Yes
Approved templates	Not required	Required for business-initiated messages

A broadcast when you want to reach people without them seeing each other. Everyone gets it privately, replies come only to you, and nobody can post to the whole list. A group when you want the conversation to be shared. Most business messaging wants a broadcast. The longer comparison is in our broadcast vs group guide.

On the free WhatsApp Business app, the usual reason is that the recipient has not saved your number. The app silently skips them, and nothing on your screen says so. On the Official WhatsApp Business API you get the actual reason per contact instead: delivered, read, or failed with the failure reason attached, visible in the campaign report.

Yes to both, for any message your business starts. WhatsApp requires that outbound messages outside an open 24-hour conversation use a template Meta has reviewed, and it requires that the recipient opted in. Those two rules are what keep a number healthy, so they are worth treating as the feature rather than the hurdle. Waplify enforces both: campaigns send approved templates only, and opted-out contacts are excluded automatically. If you are stuck on what to write, we collected 15 broadcast message examples.

No. Waplify runs on the Official WhatsApp Business API, Meta's approved channel. The Business app gets banned because it is not built for high-volume sends. The rules that keep it that way are in our guide to sending bulk WhatsApp messages safely.

Two separate bills. Meta charges per conversation at its own published rates, billed to you directly, and Waplify adds no markup on top of it. Waplify charges for the platform. See pricing for the plans, and note that every plan includes every feature: there are no tiers to upgrade through.

Yes. A broadcast is a single send. When you want a planned series instead, a drip sequence follows up on its own over days, and a chatbot flow can reply the moment someone answers. Both are covered on the WhatsApp automation page.