Room Service WhatsApp Ordering — Cost Reference
A short reference for understanding your WhatsApp bill. It only ever concerns messages sent to kitchen staff — messages to guests are always free (explained below), and this is the one part of the system where cost depends on staff behaviour rather than on the software.
Once someone messages your WhatsApp number, you can reply to that specific person for free for the next 24 hours. If they haven't messaged you recently, reaching out to them costs a small fee and requires a pre-approved message format. That's it — the entire system below is just this one rule, applied per person.
Messages a person sends to your business are always free, with no exceptions. This is Ravi's shift check-in.
Free — sent 5 hours after Ravi's check-in, well inside his 24-hour window.
Free, like every reply — and it pushes Ravi's free window forward another 24 hours.
Ravi hasn't messaged since 2:05 PM Tuesday — his window closed 55 minutes before this order came in. Delivered via a paid, pre-approved template instead. Ravi still gets it; it just isn't free.
Always free. Every order starts with the guest scanning a QR code and messaging you first — which opens their window before you ever reply. Every message after that (menu link, confirmation, status updates) rides that same window.
Free when their window is open, otherwise paid — automatically, with no difference in reliability. Whether it's free depends only on when that staff member last messaged you, not on the order itself.
What's never free: reaching people who haven't messaged you recently for promotional purposes — a "come back next month" message to a past guest, for example — always requires a paid marketing-category template. That's a deliberate limit on unsolicited outreach, not a workaround-able cost.