What is the On-Premise WhatsApp API? (India 2026)

On-Premise API was the original WhatsApp Business API path, launched in 2018. A business or BSP ran the WhatsApp Coreapp Docker container, a webapp container and a MySQL database inside their own VPC. The Coreapp connected outbound to Meta's gateway and received inbound webhooks on a publicly reachable endpoint. It powered the first wave of Indian WABA adopters between 2018 and 2022.

Meta deprecated On-Premise for new sign-ups in 2023 and announced full sunset through 2025-2026 in favour of Cloud API. The reason was operational overhead: every Coreapp version upgrade required coordinated downtime, capacity planning was painful at the per-tenant level, and incident response depended on the BSP's SRE team rather than Meta's. Cloud API removes all of that.

Any Indian operator still running On-Premise in 2026 should be on an active migration plan. Migration involves coordinating phone-number registration on Cloud API (which requires a 7-day cool-down between de-registration and re-registration with a different BSP), re-creating templates, reconnecting webhooks to the new endpoint, and reconciling conversation analytics across the cutover boundary. A competent BSP will execute this with zero downtime in a 7-to-10-day window.

Authoritative source: Meta On-Premises API deprecation notice.