Glossary · As of June 2026
What is the WhatsApp Cloud API? (India 2026)
Cloud API is Meta’s own hosted version of the WhatsApp Business API. Meta runs the servers; your business or BSP calls HTTPS endpoints on graph.facebook.com. It replaced On-Premise API as the recommended path in 2023 and is mandatory for new Indian tenants from 2025 onwards.
Cloud API endpoints live on graph.facebook.com under versioned paths such as /v24.0/{phone-number-id}/messages. Authentication is a bearer token (a system-user access token), and throughput is governed by per-phone-number rate buckets plus the tier messaging limit. Inbound messages, status updates and pricing events are delivered as webhooks rather than polling.
For Indian businesses Cloud API removes infrastructure pain: no Docker containers, no quarterly Coreapp upgrades, automatic Meta version rollouts. Billing is per conversation in INR with GST surfaced via your BSP. The trade-off is reduced customisation — Meta controls retries, queueing and version upgrades, so a good BSP layer adds idempotency, dead-letter queues and reconciliation against the pricing webhook.
Cloud API also exposes valuable analytics: conversation-analytics webhooks, template quality-score events and phone-number quality-rating changes. A well-built Indian BSP uses these to display live INR cost projections, tier headroom and inbound funnel data without polling Meta's graph endpoints. Always treat the conversation-analytics webhook as the source of truth for monthly billing reconciliation.
Authoritative source: Meta WhatsApp Cloud API reference.