Alternative
Whapi.Cloud vs WALayer.
A hosted WhatsApp gateway with a broad REST surface, billed per connected channel. Here is how the two differ, where Whapi.Cloud is genuinely the better choice, and what moving would actually involve.
The shape of each
What you are actually choosing between.
Billing model and hosting model decide more than any feature list, and unlike a feature list they do not change every month.
Whapi.Cloud
- Billing
- Flat fee per connected number
- Channel
- Unofficial gateway — operates against WhatsApp's terms
- Source
- Hosted product, closed source
- Current pricing
- On their site — we do not quote it, because a price we copied last quarter is not a price.
WALayer
- Billing
- Flat fee per connected number. Messages, media, groups and channels are not metered on any plan.
- Channel
- Unofficial gateway — the same terms exposure. We say so on /trust rather than in a footnote.
- Our pricing
- 1 number$6/mo · Solo
- 5 numbers$45/mo · Growth
- 10 numbers$45/mo · Growth
- 25 numbers$279/mo · Reseller
When Whapi.Cloud is the right answer
Reasons to not choose us.
A comparison where the other side never wins is an advertisement. These are real.
- You need a specific endpoint they have shipped and we have not — check both API references against your actual integration before switching.
- You are already integrated and it is working. A migration you do not need is a risk you do not need.
Where we differ in kind
Not a longer feature list.
These are architectural choices rather than checkboxes, which is why they are worth writing down and a feature table is not.
- Session ownership is enforced, not assumed: a Postgres advisory lock, a renewable lease, and a monotonic epoch stamped on every write to session state, so a second process cannot corrupt the Signal ratchet and force a re-scan. On lease-renewal failure the runner disconnects rather than continuing optimistically.
- Every send carries a client message id unique per tenant, and a send whose outcome is unknown is never blindly retried — it is reconciled, because the alternative is sending a real person the same message twice.
Migrating
What moving actually involves.
Every migration in this category has the same irreducible step, and no vendor can remove it.
Re-pair each number and repoint webhooks. Map their event names to ours from the webhook reference; the payload shapes differ enough that a translation layer is usually faster than rewriting handlers.
The step nobody can avoid: a WhatsApp session is device-bound crypto state, so it cannot be exported from one platform and imported into another. Every number must be linked again by QR or pairing code. Anyone claiming a zero-downtime transfer is describing something that is not possible.
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