WhatsApp rules and limits for broadcasts

Most of what people expect to go wrong with a WhatsApp broadcast — the 24-hour window, your messaging tier, your quality rating — is covered in WhatsApp limits and quality rating. This page is the campaign angle: what changes when you are sending to a thousand contacts at once instead of replying to one. Start with the rule that surprises everyone.

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You cannot type a WhatsApp broadcast

There is no message box on a WhatsApp broadcast. Step 2 of the wizard gives you a Message template picker and nothing else, and it says so: Broadcasts send an approved WhatsApp template — you can’t type a message directly. Only approved templates are listed. This is DMLY’s own choice, not a rule Meta imposes. Meta only forces a template outside the 24-hour window — a free-form message to someone who messaged you an hour ago would deliver fine. But a broadcast audience is mostly out-of-window, so a template is the only thing that reaches the whole list, and the wizard hides the composer on WhatsApp rather than let you build a send that works for a fraction of it. If the template you want does not exist yet, select Create new template in the wizard, or Manage templates on Messaging → Broadcasts. Getting it approved by Meta takes as long as it takes — plan a campaign around that, not the other way round. See Message templates.

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Two different approvals

The word “approval” means two unrelated things on this screen, and mixing them up wastes an afternoon. A held broadcast is never picked up for sending until it is approved, no matter what time you scheduled it for. If you do not have approval rights, DMLY tells you up front: You don’t have broadcast-approval rights, so this broadcast will be submitted for approval before it sends. Editing a broadcast that still needs approval clears the previous sign-off, so it has to be approved again.

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The window rarely bites — a revoked template does

Because a WhatsApp broadcast always sends a template, the 24-hour window is mostly irrelevant to it. A contact who last messaged you a year ago receives the template exactly like one who messaged you an hour ago. What does bite is timing. DMLY checks the template still reads Approved at send time, not when you scheduled it — but it checks its own stored copy of the status, not Meta’s. That copy is only refreshed when someone opens the templates page and hits Refresh templates; nothing updates it on a schedule. So if Meta pauses your template the day after you schedule, DMLY still has it as Approved, sends anyway, and Meta rejects the calls one by one. The campaign fails either way — it just fails as a pile of Meta errors rather than a clean stop.

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Template parameters

If your template has variables, the wizard shows a Body parameters input for each one. Two things worth knowing:

• The count comes from the highest number, not how many you wrote. A template body using {{1}} and {{3}} but never {{2}} asks you for three parameters. That is Meta’s numbering, and it means a gap in your numbering is a gap you have to fill in.
• A parameter can itself be personalized. Type {{first_name}} or {{custom.order_id}} into a parameter box and DMLY resolves it per recipient when the broadcast sends. That is how one template serves a whole segment.

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Tier and quality on a big send

Neither is enforced by DMLY. DMLY paces its own sending per Channel so a campaign leaves steadily rather than in one burst, but it does not count your sends against your messaging tier and will hand Meta more conversations than your tier allows. Meta rejects the overflow. The practical shape of that: a large broadcast on a low tier partially fails. Some recipients land, the rest come back as failures, and the broadcast still finishes and reports as sent. If you are on a low tier, split a big campaign across days rather than discovering the ceiling on the day.

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Opted-out contacts

No opted-out contact ever receives a broadcast. That block is applied at the moment of sending, on every channel, and it is not something you can switch off. But by default they are still counted. Reachable contacts only is unticked when you build an audience, which means opted-out contacts are pulled into the recipient list, then blocked at send — so they inflate your recipient count and land in your Failed count having received nothing. Tick Reachable contacts only to keep the numbers honest. It changes your reporting, not who gets messaged.

Does Reachable contacts only skip closed windows too?

No, despite the hint text saying it skips contacts who can’t be messaged on this channel. It filters opted-out contacts only. On WhatsApp that is the right behaviour anyway — an approved template reaches a closed window fine.

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