Chatify

Overview

WhatsApp is where customers here actually are — and the official Business API is gated behind provider approvals, template review, and per-conversation pricing a small business can't justify. Chatify is an unofficial implementation of the WhatsApp API that gives those businesses programmable messaging anyway, with a layer of AI on top. It ran in production at 100,000+ messages a year, and in 2024 it was acquired by HealthCloud — the company that had bought LabCloud from me five years earlier.

What it does

• A real API over a WhatsApp session. Send and receive messages, media, and delivery status through a clean HTTP + webhook interface. No template approvals, no gatekeeper between you and your own customers.
• AI replies that hold context. Point it at your FAQs, catalogue, or docs and it answers customer questions in the thread, remembering what was said earlier in the conversation instead of treating every message as the first.
• Handoff to a human. The agent knows what it doesn't know. When a message needs a person — pricing negotiation, a complaint, anything off-script — it escalates rather than guessing.
• Broadcasts and alerts. Order updates, appointment reminders, and delivery notifications fired from your own backend.

The honest caveat

"Unofficial" means exactly what it sounds like: this rides a WhatsApp session rather than the sanctioned Business API. It's a pragmatic tool for teams who need automation now at a price they can afford, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up as something it isn't.

What I learned

The AI wasn't the hard part. The hard part was session stability — staying connected, reconnecting cleanly, and queuing messages so nothing is silently dropped when the link goes down. Most of the engineering went into the boring reliability layer underneath the interesting bit, which is usually how this goes.