App and API
WhatsApp Coexistence: Keep Your Number, Add the API
Last checked · 18 min read
The short answer
WhatsApp coexistence lets a business run the WhatsApp Business app on a phone and Meta's Cloud API on the same number at the same time, with messages mirrored between both. Meta caps a coexistence number at 20 messages per second and switches off broadcast lists, disappearing messages, view once and live location in the phone app.
What is WhatsApp coexistence?
Coexistence is Meta's name for running the WhatsApp Business app and the WhatsApp Cloud API on one phone number at the same time. The number stays registered on the handset it has always lived on, and it is connected to a platform as well, so a whole team can answer the same conversations from a browser.
Messages travel in both directions. Meta's developer documentation states that messages sent and received are mirrored between the Cloud API and the WhatsApp Business app (Meta, Onboard WhatsApp Business app users). The owner replies from the phone and it lands in the shared inbox; an agent replies from the inbox and it appears in the customer's chat thread on the phone.
Before coexistence there was one route onto the API and it cost you the handset. A number moved to the Cloud API stopped working in the app entirely. For a business whose owner had personally answered that number for six years, that was not a migration so much as a demolition — and it is why a great many small businesses never moved at all.
What coexistence changes is the order of operations. You add the API without giving anything up on day one, then decide over the following weeks how much of the work actually moves into the shared inbox.
- What is WhatsApp coexistence?
- How is coexistence different from migrating a number to the API?
- What do you need for WhatsApp coexistence?
- Which countries is WhatsApp coexistence available in, and is it still in beta?
- What do you give up on the phone?
- Does coexistence import your past WhatsApp chats?
- How many messages can a coexistence number send?
- What does coexistence cost?
- How do you turn on WhatsApp coexistence?
- Can you undo it?
- Who should use coexistence, and who should not?
How is coexistence different from migrating a number to the API?
A full migration takes the number off the phone. Coexistence leaves it there. Everything else follows from that one difference.
| Coexistence | Full migration to Cloud API | |
|---|---|---|
| The number on your phone | Keeps working in the WhatsApp Business app | Stops working in the app — the number lives only in the API |
| Who can reply | The phone, plus your whole team through a shared inbox | Your whole team through a shared inbox |
| Past chats | Meta permits a sync of the most recent six months | Nothing carries over |
| Meta's registration step | Skipped — Meta treats the number as already registered | Required, and the step most likely to go wrong |
| Throughput | Fixed at 20 messages per second | Set by Meta per number, and can be higher |
| Broadcast lists on the phone | Disabled; existing lists become read-only | Not applicable — the app no longer runs the number |
| Reversing it | From the app's own settings, by the business | The number must be deregistered from the Cloud API before the app can take it back |
| Best suited to | A number your team already answers on a handset | A new number, or one that never lived on a phone |
The registration row is worth pausing on. Meta's coexistence documentation tells partners to skip the phone number registration step, because the number is already registered. On a full migration that step is a live risk: it is where errors surface if the number carries a two-step PIN, and repeated failed attempts against the same number are rate-limited by Meta. Coexistence removes that whole class of failure by never touching it.
If the difference between the app and the API is still the question underneath all this, the WhatsApp Business app versus the API comparison is the shorter read, and the WhatsApp Business API explainer covers the rules every provider works inside.
What do you need for WhatsApp coexistence?
Five things, and three of them are your platform's problem rather than yours.
| Requirement | Detail | Whose rule |
|---|---|---|
| The number is on the WhatsApp Business app | Not the ordinary WhatsApp app — coexistence onboards Business app accounts | Meta |
| App version 2.24.17 or higher | Meta names this version explicitly | Meta |
| Your platform holds Tech Provider or Solution Partner access | Meta documents the coexistence onboarding flow for Solution Partners and Tech Providers only | Meta |
| The platform's WhatsApp permissions are at Advanced Access | At Standard Access the journey is refused with error 2655111, after the customer has typed their number | Meta, observed by us |
| The platform uses Embedded Signup v4 | Meta deprecates Embedded Signup v2 on 15 October 2026 | Meta |
The first row is the one that catches people out. Coexistence is defined for the WhatsApp Business app. If your number is sitting on the ordinary green WhatsApp app that everybody has on their phone, there is nothing for coexistence to connect to — that number would need to be on the WhatsApp Business app first.
The Advanced Access row is our own observation rather than a documented rule, and it is dated: on 13 August 2026 Meta granted Advanced Access on the two WhatsApp permissions to WabaCRM, and the coexistence journey opened on the same day. Before that, with the ordinary Embedded Signup working perfectly for everyone, the coexistence path alone dead-ended on error 2655111 several screens deep. It looked exactly like a broken integration and was not one.
The version row has a date on it because it is a deadline. Meta states that Embedded Signup v2 will be deprecated on 15 October 2026 and that developers must move to v4 before then to avoid disruption (Meta, Reconnect offboarded coexistence clients). It is a fair thing to ask a platform which version it runs.
Nothing in that list asks you to have completed Meta's business verification first. Verification still matters for how much you may send — that is further down — but it is not a gate on turning coexistence on.
Which countries is WhatsApp coexistence available in, and is it still in beta?
Here is the honest answer, and it is less satisfying than the tables you will find elsewhere.
Meta's coexistence documentation names no countries. Read on 22 August 2026, it sets out versions, permissions, limits, sync windows and offboarding, and addresses country availability nowhere — no supported list, no excluded markets, and no description of the feature as a beta.
The country rollout timelines circulating on vendor blogs — a first group in early 2025, later dates for the EU, the UK and parts of Africa — are not sourced to Meta on any page we could find, including the pages making them.
That does not mean they are wrong. It means nobody publishing them can show you where they came from, and a rollout schedule reprinted from another vendor's blog is exactly the kind of claim this market gets wrong for years at a time. The dead "1,000 free conversations a month" allowance is still printed on 2026-dated pricing pages for the same reason.
The check that actually works is the dialog. Availability is decided per number when the signup window opens, and the window either offers to connect your existing WhatsApp Business account or it does not. That takes about a minute and answers for your number, in your country, today — which no list can.
What do you give up on the phone?
Four things, and only four. Meta publishes a feature matrix with two separate columns, and conflating them is how the internet ended up believing you lose your labels — so read this as "what changes on the handset", not "what the Cloud API supports".
| What switches off in the WhatsApp Business app | Scope |
|---|---|
| Broadcast lists | Disabled; existing lists become read-only |
| Disappearing messages | Turned off for all one-to-one chats |
| View once | Disabled for all one-to-one chats |
| Live location | Disabled for all one-to-one chats |
Everything else on the handset carries on. Your catalog, your labels, your quick replies, your away message, your business profile, your voice and video calls, your groups — unchanged. What those have in common is that the Cloud API does not expose them, which is a different statement from the feature dying: they keep working in the app, they simply do not travel to a shared inbox, which is why a platform gives you its own labels and its own quick replies rather than mirroring the phone's.
Two consequences are worth establishing before you connect rather than after. Companion devices are unlinked once during onboarding, so expect to scan a QR code again — and Meta lists WhatsApp for Windows and WhatsApp for WearOS as unsupported afterwards. And losing broadcast lists sounds worse than it is: WhatsApp caps a broadcast list at 256 contacts and delivers only to people who saved your number (WhatsApp's own page), while an API campaign carries neither condition. What it does not replace is firing one off from your thumb while queueing at the bank.
The full thirteen-row matrix, the ones Meta documents versus the ones partners merely repeat, and the limits that only bite in month two are in exactly what stops working under coexistence. This page covers the decision; that one is the reference.
Does coexistence import your past WhatsApp chats?
Meta permits it. Its documentation allows a platform to synchronise all chat messages from the most recent six months — messages within 180 days of the moment the business was onboarded — along with every contact holding a WhatsApp number. Group chats are never included. The whole sync has to be completed within 24 hours of onboarding, or the customer is offboarded and has to run the flow again.
Whether it happens is your platform's decision, and platforms differ. WabaCRM does not import your history, deliberately. Your past chats stay on the phone, where they already are, and your WabaCRM inbox starts empty and fills from the first new message.
The reason is unglamorous. A six-month backfill for an active business number is a very large webhook payload, and the failure mode when one is rejected is not a missing import — Meta retries, then disables the webhook subscription for that WhatsApp Business Account, which stops ordinary inbound messages arriving as well. Trading a live inbox for a convenience feature is a bad trade, so we do not make it.
What does arrive is everything from the moment you connect. Messages your team sends from the phone appear in the shared inbox labelled as sent from WhatsApp on the phone, because the message echo feed is subscribed even though the history feed is not. Contacts appear as customers write in, and a contact list you already hold elsewhere can be imported as a CSV in the ordinary way.
If an imported six-month archive is the thing you actually want, ask any platform you are evaluating whether they subscribe to the history feed, and what happens on their side when a sync fails. It is a fair question and the answer is revealing.
How many messages can a coexistence number send?
Two different ceilings, and they are frequently confused.
Throughput is how fast messages leave. Meta's documentation is explicit: business phone numbers in use with both the WhatsApp Business app and the Cloud API have a fixed throughput of 20 messages per second (Meta, Onboard WhatsApp Business app users).
Fixed is Meta's own word and it is doing work — this is not a starting rate that scales up with good behaviour the way messaging limits do. A platform that lets you configure a higher send rate on a coexistence number is setting you up for delivery errors rather than faster sending.
The messaging limit counts people, not messages. Meta defines it as the number of unique WhatsApp users you can deliver messages to outside an open customer service window in a moving 24-hour period — so replying to customers who wrote to you first does not consume it. New business portfolios start at 250, and the ladder above runs 2,000, 10,000, 100,000, then unlimited (Meta, Messaging limits).
That qualifier matters more than the number. A busy inbox answering inbound messages can sit under a 250 limit indefinitely without ever touching it; it is outbound-first sending that spends the allowance.
Meta publishes three routes to 2,000: verify your business, have a partner verify it for you, or deliver 2,000 messages to unique WhatsApp numbers outside a customer service window inside a moving 30-day period, using templates with a high quality rating. Above 2,000 Meta scales you automatically when your quality is high and you have used at least half your current limit in the last seven days.
So one of those three routes runs through a partner, and none of the rest do. Nobody can sell you a higher throughput figure, and nobody can hand you a messaging limit — the ladder is Meta's, and it is climbed by sending well.
In practice 20 messages per second is 72,000 an hour, so throughput is rarely what holds a business back. The messaging limit usually is, and it is the reason nobody honest promises you a broadcast to your entire list in week one. How broadcast limits actually work covers the ladder in detail.
What does coexistence cost?
Coexistence adds no Meta fee of its own. The costs are the ordinary two.
Meta charges for messages. Its documentation states that messages sent by the business via the WhatsApp Business app will continue to be free, but messages sent via Cloud API will be subject to Cloud API pricing. So the reply your owner taps out on the handset costs nothing, and the same reply typed into the shared inbox is priced by Meta's rate card.
That card moved to per-message pricing on 1 July 2025, replacing the older per-conversation model (Meta, WhatsApp pricing). Templates are billed on delivery by category — marketing, utility or authentication — at rates that vary by the recipient's country.
Several things stay free under that model, until 1 October 2026. All non-template messages are free inside an open customer service window, and utility templates delivered inside that window are free — Meta's non-template-messages documentation states both become chargeable per message from that date, detailed in what changes on 1 October 2026. Everything sent inside an open free entry point window stays free for the 72 hours that window is open, unaffected by that change.
If you have read anywhere that you get 1,000 free conversations a month, that allowance belonged to conversation-based billing and went with it on 1 July 2025. It is still printed on vendor pages carrying 2026 dates, which is a useful test of how recently a page was actually checked.
Then a platform charges for the software: the shared inbox, the campaigns, the CRM, the automation. WabaCRM's free plan is capped by contact count rather than by time — it holds your first 1,000 contacts with no expiry — and the paid plans are priced per 1,000 contacts a month, with unlimited team members on every plan including the free one. The full pricing page shows the figures, and whether the API itself is free answers the question underneath.
One structural note, because it changes who your message fees go to. Meta classifies partners into tiers, and a Tech Provider is not permitted to resell Meta's per-message fees. WabaCRM is a Meta-verified Tech Provider, verified on 30 July 2026, so those fees are billed by Meta directly against your own WhatsApp Business Account. There is no markup to remove because there is no fee passing through us.
The trade-off is that you attach a payment method to your own Meta account before your first broadcast. WabaCRM itself asks for no card; the job as a whole does, and it is better to know that now than at launch. The difference between the tiers is unpacked in Tech Provider versus BSP.
How do you turn on WhatsApp coexistence?
From your side it is short. You open the numbers screen on your platform, choose the option to connect an existing number, and a Meta-hosted window takes over.
Inside that window you enter your WhatsApp Business app phone number and Meta shows you a verification code. A message then arrives on that handset from the official Facebook Business Account. Meta's documentation gives the taps in order: Connect, then Connect to the Business Platform, then Confirm to give the business the option of sharing its chat history — and finally you paste the verification code back into the window to finish (Meta, Onboard WhatsApp Business app users).
That third tap offers to share your chat history. Meta presents it whether or not the platform on the other end has any intention of reading it — WabaCRM does not, for the reasons in the history section above, so tapping Confirm and tapping past it produce the same inbox on our side.
Two honest notes about what happens next.
The first is that Meta's dialog does not always finish cleanly. We have driven this journey live, and there is a failure where the partner attachment succeeds — the phone reads Connected platform, the account appears in the portfolio, Meta's own records show the number connected — while the authorisation code that completes the handshake never comes back to the platform.
Nothing errors on your screen when that happens. A platform that has met it builds a recovery path; one that has not will tell you to try again, which does not help. It is a fair thing to ask about before you start.
The second is that there is a third option and you may need it. WabaCRM's numbers screen offers Embedded Signup, coexistence and manual credentials side by side, because exactly one of the three will work for any given number and finding out which costs several screens inside Meta's flow. Manual credentials is not a fallback for a broken product; it is the only route for some account structures, and it is what recovers a number when a dialog strands one.
What nobody can promise you is a same-day launch. Meta verifies businesses on its own schedule, and a new number starts on a low messaging limit regardless of how the number was connected. Coexistence gets your team into the conversations quickly. It does not shorten Meta's queue.
Can you undo it?
Yes, and the off switch belongs to the business rather than to the platform, which is unusual enough to be worth stating. In the WhatsApp Business app: Settings, Account, Business Platform, Disconnect Account.
It can also end by accident — changing phone or re-registering the app offboards the client — and there is a reonboarding path for that. The limitations post covers both, with Meta's own documentation cited.
Who should use coexistence, and who should not?
Coexistence is the right answer when a number already carries real relationships on a handset. A showroom line the owner has answered personally for years, a clinic's reception number saved in a thousand patients' phones, a founder's mobile that is functionally the company's front door. Those numbers are assets, and coexistence puts a team behind one without asking anybody to change how they already work.
Pair it with a shared team inbox and the change your customers notice is that replies got faster.
It is the wrong answer in three cases. If you are launching a new line, register it fresh through ordinary Embedded Signup and skip the 20 messages per second cap entirely. If broadcast volume from day one is the whole point, the phone app is not doing anything for you and a full migration is cleaner. And if the number is on the ordinary WhatsApp app rather than the Business app, coexistence is not the path you are looking at.
The trade-off worth holding in your head is that coexistence buys continuity and pays for it in ceilings — fixed throughput, four features switched off on the phone, and a set of app tools the API cannot see. For most businesses moving an established number, that is a good trade. It is only a bad one if nobody told you about it first.
Every Meta claim on this page was checked against Meta's developer documentation and WhatsApp's Help Centre on 22 August 2026, and each is linked to its source above. WabaCRM's coexistence support has been live in production since 13 August 2026. Where we could not verify a figure — notably the country-by-country rollout dates circulating elsewhere — it is not printed here.