What is a WhatsApp chatbot and how does it work?
PingPlug · Updated
A WhatsApp chatbot is software connected to the WhatsApp Business Platform that reads incoming messages and replies without a person. It cannot be built on the consumer or Business apps, which expose no interface for it — the Platform is the only route. What it may send is governed by the same rules a human agent works under: free-form replies within 24 hours of the customer’s last message, and an approved template outside that.
Why the app cannot run one
The WhatsApp Business app offers greeting and away messages and nothing further. They fire on a schedule rather than on what was said, so they are not a chatbot in any useful sense.
Anything that reads the message and decides a reply needs the Business Platform, which means a number registered to it and software connected on the other end.
The two kinds, and where each stops
Rule-based bots follow a script: a menu, a keyword, a branch. Predictable and cheap to reason about, and they fail the moment somebody phrases a request in a way the author did not anticipate.
Model-based bots interpret the message instead of matching it. They cope with unexpected phrasing and will, sooner or later, state something confidently wrong — which is why the useful question is not which kind is better but what happens when it is out of its depth.
The rule that constrains every reply
Within 24 hours of the customer’s most recent message a bot may answer freely, in whatever words it likes.
Outside that, it may only send a template approved in advance. A bot that has fallen silent overnight cannot resume the conversation with a sentence it composed itself, however sensible that sentence is.
What is free and what is not
The bot software may well be free, and plenty of open-source projects are. That is not the part that costs money.
The Business Platform is what you are billed for: Meta charges for conversations your business starts, and the rate depends on the template category and the recipient’s country. A free bot on a paid Platform is the normal arrangement, not a contradiction.
Replying inside the customer’s service window — which is most of what a support bot does — has not been charged for under any version of the pricing model to date.
Handover is the part that decides whether it works
Every bot meets a question it should not answer. What matters is whether it hands the conversation to a person cleanly, with the exchange so far intact, or leaves the customer repeating themselves.
A bot with no route to a human does not reduce support load. It postpones it, and returns the customer angrier than they arrived.
PingPlug’s chatbot answers in the same shared inbox the team works in, so a handover is a person picking up a thread rather than a transfer between systems. It runs on the official Cloud API, which means the 24-hour rule above applies to it exactly as described — no tool can exempt itself from that.