What it holds, who owns it, how many you need — and how Meta is changing it.
A WhatsApp Business Account — WABA for short — is the account on Meta that holds your message templates and phone numbers, and the one Meta bills for your messages. It sits inside your business portfolio. It is not the WhatsApp Business app, and it is not an account with your software provider: it belongs to your business.
The middle of three layers.
Four things, and they stay with the account.
Three things it gets confused with.
Your business owns it. Software is given access, and access can be taken back.
When you connect a product built on the API, Meta opens a signup window where you choose the account and grant access to it. The account stays in your portfolio. An account can be shared with up to two partners at a time ().
Ending the connection doesn't delete anything on Meta's side: the account, its templates and its numbers remain where they were.
A portfolio can hold up to twenty. More accounts don't mean more reach.
Businesses open a second account for a separate brand, a different billing currency, or a region that runs its own marketing. A portfolio can hold up to 20 accounts ().
What a second account doesn't give you is capacity. The messaging limit belongs to the portfolio, so every account and every number under it draws from the same daily allowance.
From the second half of 2026, one account becomes two.
Meta has announced that the WhatsApp Business Account will be split into an account for the number — with its profile and username, owned by the business and shareable with several partners — and a messaging account that holds templates and billing ().
The first phase is automatic: numbers and templates carry over, and nothing changes in how you send. The later phases, through 2028, concern the software that talks to Meta rather than the people who use it ().
In WhatsApp Manager, inside Meta Business Suite.
WhatsApp Manager lists every account in your portfolio with its numbers, templates, limits and alerts. Each account has an ID — a long number — that support teams and software will ask for.
Rapio is built on the Cloud API and connects to a WhatsApp Business Account that stays yours. Templates are created in your account, Meta bills your card, and if you stop using Rapio the account, its templates and its numbers are still there on Meta.
Meta bills the messages at its list price. We charge a fixed fee for the software.