WhatsApp groups run by a business: who qualifies, the eight-person limit, and how Meta charges per member

Invite only

Participants join through an invite link your system sends them. Meta's page says the link carries context about the group so the person can decide whether to join. Groups can also be set to require a join request.

Up to eight participants

Meta's maximum. One business per group.

Up to 10,000 groups per business number

The ceiling is on groups, not on people: many small rooms, not one big one.

What can be sent

Text, media, and templates with text or media. Group messages can be pinned and unpinned. Templates used in groups get no performance metrics, and Meta advises creating templates specifically for groups rather than reusing one-to-one ones.

What cannot

Calls, disappearing messages, view-once media, authentication templates, catalog and commerce messages, and interactive messages. Sent messages cannot be edited or deleted, and the participant list cannot be hidden.

Management is from your system: create and delete groups, get and reset the invite link, remove participants, read group info, list the active groups, update settings.

Meta's newer groups pages add a few practical rules:

Sending the invite

Three ways, Meta says: paste the link into a one-to-one chat, use the group invite template from Meta's Template Library (a utility template), or write your own marketing template.

When someone cannot join

Meta's FAQ gives three reasons: the invite link was deleted, the person was removed from the group before, or the group is already full.

Pinned messages

Only the group admin can pin or unpin, one message at a time. With three already pinned, pinning another unpins the oldest.

Deleting a group

Nobody, the business included, can message it afterwards. Messages that reached Meta before the deletion may still arrive at the business's system.

Where

Every country where Meta's Cloud API is available.

What the customer sees

WhatsApp's Help Center tells customers that joining a business's group is optional: they tap Join group to join, Exit group to leave at any time, and Safety tools to review their privacy. It warns them that live location sharing may also be unavailable, that members may not be able to become admins, and that they may not be able to invite the business to their other groups. A business cannot add someone whose group privacy settings prevent it.

Per person reached

Meta's page is explicit: a billable message sent to a group is charged once for every member it is delivered to, at the rate for that member's country. A marketing template to a group of five, delivered to four, is four marketing messages.

Inside the window, since 1 October 2026

Utility templates sent inside an open group window are charged. Plain typed messages are free only while the business number is inside its monthly free tier of 1,000 service messages, and that tier is shared with your one-to-one chats, with each group send using one unit per member it reaches. Before 1 October 2026 both were free inside a group window.

Outside the window

Templates, charged by category per recipient, as in any other chat.

A group of eight that chats every day therefore uses the free tier eight times faster than one customer would. The guide to the 1 October reply charge explains the tier, and the guide to how Meta charges the categories.