Thredo runs on the official WhatsApp Business API through Meta Cloud API. Your number, your account, fully within Meta's rules.
4 s
Median first reply, 21:00 included
1–3 days
Typical Meta approval
Yours
Number kept, verified, never resold
Hi — order #4821 still hasn't arrived. Can you check?
It left our Bristol warehouse today and is due Friday. Want me to send the tracking link?
Yes please.
Sent. Anything else I can check?
The rules that get numbers blocked are the ones Thredo enforces for you, automatically, on every thread.
Thredo never starts a conversation with someone who hasn't opted in. It answers people who message you, and messages back only where you have consent on file.
No bought lists, no cold broadcasts.
Inside 24 hours of a customer's message the agent can reply freely. After that it switches to a template Meta has approved — a delivery update, not a sales pitch.
We submit the templates and keep them approved.
If someone replies STOP the agent stops immediately, marks the contact opted out, and tells you. Nobody has to ask twice, and no one on your team can undo it by accident.
Also honours “unsubscribe” and “remove me”.
A customer's message is never passed to a third party without their knowledge. It stays in your inbox and is never used to train models.
Hosted in the United States, with Standard Contractual Clauses for UK and EU transfers. Data processing agreement on request.
Offers times that are genuinely free and writes them to your calendar.
Booking confirmed, then a reminder the day before as an approved template.
“Where's #4821?” gets a real dispatch date, not a holding reply.
Name, number and what they want, synced to your CRM while they're still keen.
Complaints and refunds come to you with the whole thread attached.
21:00 on a Thursday is when most of these arrive. It answers anyway.
Meta verifies your business first — usually one to three days. Web chat and email answer immediately while you wait.
Through Meta's own embedded sign-up flow — you log into Facebook, confirm your business, and Thredo never sees your password.
Meta approval: usually 1–3 days.
Paste your URL and the agent learns your prices, hours, services and policies. Add a PDF price list if you have one.
About a minute.
Watch the first threads as they happen and take over any of them by typing. The agent pauses that conversation while you do.
The 24-hour customer service window is the period after a customer messages your business during which you can reply with anything you like — free-form text, images, buttons, no approval needed. It opens the moment they send a message and closes 24 hours after their last one, so an ongoing conversation keeps extending it. Once it closes, you can no longer send an ordinary reply. You can only send a template: a message you wrote in advance and Meta approved, in one of three categories — marketing, utility or authentication. Sending the wrong category, or trying to dress a promotion up as a delivery update, is one of the faster ways to damage your quality rating. Thredo tracks the window per conversation and switches automatically, so the agent replies freely inside it and reaches for an approved template outside it. You never have to know which side of the line a thread is on.
Numbers are almost never blocked for sending too much. They are blocked for sending to people who did not ask, which shows up as blocks and reports from recipients and drags your quality rating down until Meta restricts your messaging limit. The three behaviours that cause it: messaging contacts who never opted in, sending marketing content through a utility template, and ignoring people who ask you to stop. Thredo enforces all three at the point of sending rather than leaving them to a policy document — it will not open a conversation with a contact who has no consent on file, it will not send a marketing message under a utility template, and a reply of STOP, unsubscribe or remove me opts the contact out immediately and tells you it happened. Nobody on your team can undo that by accident.
The rules themselves are Meta's, not ours: WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy and the Cloud API documentation.
From , service messages become billable. A service message is an ordinary reply sent inside the 24-hour window — the thing support actually is. Those replies have been free since November 2024, however many you sent. In October they are charged at the same per-message rate Meta already applies to utility and authentication templates in that market, with no volume tier. Meta is expected to publish final country rates by 1 September 2026.
The businesses least affected are the ones that mostly broadcast, because marketing templates were already billed. The ones most affected are doing the thing WhatsApp is good at — answering people. A delayed-order thread might take four replies today and cost nothing; the same thread in October is four billable messages. That is eight weeks before Black Friday.
Rates are per market and set by Meta, not by Thredo. Thredo bills only for replies its agent generates.
You connect three things: your WhatsApp number through Meta's official embedded signup, your Shopify store, and the pages the agent should answer from. After that the agent handles the questions a store actually gets on WhatsApp — where the order is, when it will arrive, what the returns window is, whether something is in stock — and passes the rest to you. The order lookup is read-only and verified: before it says anything about an order it asks for two facts that must both match, and it gives the same answer whether the order does not exist or the details are wrong, so the number cannot be used to probe your store. It will not cancel an order, change an address or issue a refund. Those reach a person, with the whole thread attached.
Embedded signup on your own number and your own Business account. Meta typically verifies a business in one to three days, and nothing about the number changes hands.
Products, prices and stock come from the storefront, which needs no credentials. Order lookup needs a read-only Admin token. The agent reads your pages for policies, hours and delivery.
Every conversation is visible as it happens and you can take over mid-sentence. Replying yourself does not switch the agent off — you choose, per message.
See what it reads from a Shopify store, and what it never reads
Not for using Thredo. Bans come from messaging people who never opted in, ignoring STOP, or sending non-template marketing outside the 24-hour window. Thredo enforces all three for you automatically.
A number on the WhatsApp Business API can't also be used in the consumer WhatsApp app. Most businesses move their customer-facing number to the API and keep a personal number separate.
Meta lets you reply freely for 24 hours after a customer messages you. After that you can only send templates Meta has approved. Thredo tracks the window per conversation and switches automatically.
No, if your current number isn't already registered to a personal WhatsApp account. If it is, you either migrate it or use a different number — Meta's flow tells you which applies during setup.
No. The WhatsApp Business API does not support group conversations, so Thredo answers one-to-one threads only.
Start on web chat today and add WhatsApp the moment Meta approves you.