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Once a customer has messaged you, you have a 24-hour window to reply with free-form text, media, or a quick-reply button message — no template required. This is the API your inbox and bots use to actually converse.

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Endpoint

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Request body

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string
required
Recipient’s phone number in E.164 format.
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string
required
One of text, image, document, interactive.
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string
Message body, required when type is text.
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string
Publicly reachable URL, required when type is image or document.
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object
Required when type is interactive. Currently supports quick-reply buttons only: { "body": "...", "buttons": [{ "id": "yes", "title": "Yes" }] }. List-style interactive messages aren’t supported through this endpoint yet.
Not sure which Windows tab to use? The two aren’t interchangeable — pasting one into the wrong shell fails with a ... is not recognized error. Use CMD only in classic Command Prompt. Use PowerShell if your terminal is PowerShell, Windows Terminal, or VS Code’s integrated terminal — the default on most modern Windows setups. The PowerShell example uses Invoke-RestMethod rather than curl.exe to avoid PowerShell’s known issues passing complex quoted JSON to external executables.
Response

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Checking message status

Response
status here reflects WhatsApp’s actual delivery lifecycle: sent, delivered, read, or failed (the accepted you get back from the POST just means Tanvik accepted the request — check this endpoint or the message.status webhook for what actually happened on the wire).
Sending outside the 24-hour window fails with send_failed — the error message will say the session window is closed. Use Send Templates to re-open the conversation instead.

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Receiving messages

Inbound customer messages arrive as message.received webhook events, not through this endpoint — see the Webhook page for the payload shape, and Webhooks to register an endpoint.