Every WhatsApp tool starts after the hard part
Broadcast tools, chatbots, shared inboxes — almost all of them begin at the same place: upload your contacts. Which leaves the actual question unanswered. Where does a business that has never done outbound get the numbers, and how does it know it is allowed to message them? This page is about those two steps.
The step everyone skips
“Import your contact list” assumes a contact list. For a business that has been selling through referrals and walk-ins, there is no CSV to upload — and buying one is how you end up messaging numbers with no idea where they came from, which is both a compliance problem and a reply-rate problem.
The alternative is to build the list from businesses that have published a way to contact them, for the market you actually sell to.
Finding the numbers
You describe the businesses the way you would say it out loud — an industry and a city — and get back real ones with their listed address, phone number and website. Try it; this is the live product and needs no account:
What you get, and what you do not
You get what the business published. You do not get a named decision-maker, a personal mobile, or a verified WhatsApp opt-in — nobody can sell you those honestly for a cold list. Filters are location, business type, rating and price level.
Whether you may message them
The honest sequence, which most tools compress into “start sending”:
- You need a lawful basis for holding the number and for messaging it. A public listing is not, by itself, consent to be marketed at.
- Your first message must be a template Meta reviewed and approved in advance. There is no way around this and no tool that has one.
- They must be able to stop hearing from you, immediately and easily.
- Once they reply, a 24-hour window opens in which you can talk normally. Rechlio enforces its close server-side rather than leaving it to you to remember.
The rules in full, including what Meta’s policies actually prohibit.
The first message
Before you spend a template on 500 businesses, the list gets scored against a description of your company, so the fifty most plausible are at the top. Each gets a suggested opening written for that specific business — a first draft, not a finished pitch.
Sends go out in the campaign send window, which defaults to Monday to Friday, 9:30am–6:30pm IST. Replies land in a shared inbox with a status, an assignee and a label, and get classified so the interested ones surface first.
What the path costs
| Finding a businessImported from its listing | ₹0.20 |
|---|---|
| Scoring it before you messageAgainst your company profile | ₹2.00 |
| Sending the WhatsApp messageRechlio platform fee | ₹0 |
| The WhatsApp conversation itselfBilled to you by Meta directly | Meta’s rate |
| Classifying the reply | ₹0.10 |
The ₹0 is the unusual one: Rechlio is a Meta Tech Provider, so you connect your own WhatsApp Business account and Meta bills you rather than us marking it up. See pricing.
Questions
- Where do the phone numbers come from?
- Business listings — the number a business has published for people to contact it. Not a purchased contact database, and not personal numbers scraped from anywhere. That means coverage is good for businesses that want to be found and poor for ones that do not.
- Is a published number the same as consent to message?
- No, and this is the part that gets businesses banned. A published number means you may contact them; Meta’s policy and India’s data protection law govern whether you may market to them, and on WhatsApp the practical gate is that your first message must be an approved template. Getting this wrong shows up as blocks, then as a falling quality rating, then as a restricted number.
- Can I try the search without signing up?
- Yes — the box on this page is the live product. One search without an account, which is enough to see whether the businesses you sell to are findable at all.