WhatsApp

WhatsApp is coming soon. Production delivery and purchase remain disabled in InBrief Cloud, and trial access does not enable them. This guide and its demo describe the screen under Dashboard → Alerts → Channels → WhatsApp as it is being built.

It supports alerts to named recipients when a monitor goes down or recovers, and when an incident is opened, updated or resolved. Messages use your business sender. The prices and credits shown below describe that configuration, not an offer you can buy today. See Billing for purchase availability.

Key features

• Two ways to be the sender: connect your own WhatsApp Business account, or let InBrief set it up for you and pay per message in credits.
• A receiver list you control. Visitors to your status page cannot add themselves; you add people, and each one confirms their number with a code.
• Per-person scope: everything, or only the services somebody is responsible for, with the cost of an incident shown beside each name.
• A balance, a per-incident estimate and a ledger, on the same screen, so "how many more incidents can I afford" is a number rather than a division.
• A separate, personal switch: anyone on the team can have alerts sent to their own number.

The screen

Dashboard → Alerts → Channels → WhatsApp. The account's sender comes first, because it decides who your messages come from; your own number is underneath.

Choosing how to send

Both arrangements are the same software: a WhatsApp Business account that belongs to your company, with InBrief sending through it. What differs is who deals with Meta and who pays for each message.

	Connect your own WhatsApp	Let us handle it
Setup	You go through Meta's signup yourself, about two minutes, and paste back what it gives you.	You give us the number and the email of somebody who administers your Meta business. They accept one request.
Who pays Meta	You. Add a payment method at Meta; they bill you directly per message.	We do. You buy credits from InBrief and each message spends some.
Sender numbers	As many as you need, with one marked as the default.	One.

Before Meta's popup, the dashboard lists what you will need: a telephone number that is not already signed in to WhatsApp, someone who administers your Meta business, and (for your own account) a payment method to add at Meta. Ten seconds of reading that prevents a failed attempt.

After connecting, Meta has to approve the message templates InBrief sends with. The screen shows Waiting for Meta to approve until every template is approved, and Ask Meta again re-reads their answer on demand. A hosted account also passes through Waiting for the request to be accepted until your administrator accepts.

Who gets alerted

You add each person by name and number. They receive a six-digit code on their handset and read it back to you; until it is typed in, they are on the list but nothing is sent to them. Each row has a scope, Everything or Only the ones I pick, and that is the whole of what decides which alerts reach whom. A component added next week is not automatically picked up by a hand-picked scope, the same as ticking every box by hand.

On a credit-metered account the cost of one incident on each person's telephone is shown beside them. It depends on their country, not on anything you do, and narrowing an expensive receiver's scope is the simplest way to spend less.

Credits

Only the hosted arrangement uses credits. One incident sends about five messages to each receiver (opened, updates, resolved), so the screen prices an incident rather than a message: what is left, what it went on this month, and what the next incident will take if it reaches everybody.

Package	Price	Credits
Starter	$10	2,000
Standard	$15	3,000
Large	$50	10,000

Package prices are fixed. What a message costs in credits follows Meta's published rate for the receiver's country and can change when Meta changes its rates, with thirty days' notice; credits you already hold keep their value. The screen's What a message costs disclosure lists the rate for every country we send to, for example:

Country	Credits per message
Egypt	2
United States	2
India	4
Saudi Arabia	5

A new hosted account starts with a grant that covers its first five incidents. When the balance drops below 500 credits the screen warns and an email goes out; at zero, WhatsApp alerts stop while email and Slack carry on. Buy this package again when my credits run out, ticked on a purchase, refills automatically at most once a month and can be switched off at any time. A receiver in a country Meta publishes no rate for is shown as Not priced and is not sent to.

Your own number

Separate from the receiver list, the panel at the bottom lets you, personally, have alerts sent to your own WhatsApp: enter the number, type the code that arrives, done. Stop alerting me on WhatsApp removes it. It is a per-person setting; it does not add you to the account's receiver list or spend the account's credits on your behalf beyond the messages you receive.

When things go wrong

The screen says	What it means
Alerts are not arriving	Meta removed the access. Nothing has been sent since. Disconnect and set the sender up again.
Sending has stopped	The credit balance is zero. Buy credits; email and Slack alerts were unaffected.
Meta has rated your number down	A yellow or red quality rating, which usually follows people blocking or reporting messages, and precedes Meta restricting the number. Check who is on the receiver list and what they are subscribed to.
Messages are written to the server log	This deployment has no WhatsApp credentials. Everything else works; nothing reaches a handset.

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