How opt-outs, consent, and cost reports work in WACRM

WACRM gives you three independent ways to stay safe and in control of cost on WhatsApp: an automatic opt-out that blocks future template and broadcast sends to a contact with no setup needed, a consent record that gates every broadcast, and a cost report you can pull through the API. This walks through all three as they work today — including the one piece, a Workspace report screen for cost, that doesn’t exist yet.

What you need before you start

• A WACRM Workspace account with at least one project and at least one contact conversation, for the opt-out and consent sections.
• Owner access to the workspace and a way to call an HTTP API (curl or similar), for the cost report section — the screen that mints the API key is owner-only.

Stop sending to a contact — opt-out keywords

WACRM watches every inbound text message — on WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger, and Instagram — for an exact opt-out keyword, case-insensitive, after stripping punctuation and collapsing extra whitespace — a sentence that merely contains the word doesn’t count. The moment a contact sends one, WACRM records their opt-out for the channel it arrived on. On WhatsApp, every later attempt to send them a template or broadcast message is then blocked with a consent_required error, automatically, with nothing for you to configure — a free-text reply to that contact inside an open 24-hour window still goes through:

WACRM sends nothing back when this happens — no automatic confirmation reply — and the same message is also excluded from WACRM’s own AI auto-reply. Opt-outs are recorded per channel, so STOP on one channel doesn’t opt the contact out of another:

SMS, Messenger, and Instagram never require an opt-in first — only an explicit opt-out blocks a send. WhatsApp template and broadcast sends are the opposite: they need a recorded opt-in (next section). Re-subscribing isn’t automatic either (see the FAQ) — treat an opt-out as something you have to deliberately reverse, the same way you recorded it.

Require consent before a broadcast — the Inbox consent card

A contact’s recorded WhatsApp marketing opt-in is the only signal WACRM’s broadcast system checks before it sends them a template. To record one:

1. Open Conversations → Inbox and select the contact’s conversation.
2. Find the WhatsApp marketing consent card in the side panel. It shows the contact’s current status and, if set, when it was last recorded.
3. Click Record opt-in (or Record opt-out), optionally adding a short note in Source / proof on where the consent came from.

This card makes no legal certification — recording opt-in only tells WACRM the merchant says this customer agreed to receive WhatsApp marketing messages. But it’s the record Broadcasts actually acts on: start a campaign under Messaging → Broadcasts and each recipient without a recorded opt-in is skipped — nothing is sent to them, and the campaign’s Skipped count goes up, captioned No opt-in consent — while the campaign still runs for everyone else. See the first-template guide for the full broadcast walkthrough.

Pull a message cost report and forecast via the API

There’s no cost report screen in Workspace yet — this works through the API only, and only the workspace owner can reach the screen that mints the key.

1. As the owner, open Developer / API & MCP in Workspace’s sidebar (/settings).

2. Create a new key — a Secret key (sk_live_…) for a server or script — and check Restrict what this key can do (advanced).

3. Under WhatsApp CRM scopes, check cost_reports:read, then create the key. It’s shown exactly once — copy it immediately.

   Creating keys and restricting scopes depends on your plan — Workspace shows an upgrade notice if yours doesn’t include it.

4. Call the cost report endpoint with that key:

   Code Copy

   curl -s "https://api.wacrm.ai/v1/crm-projects/{project}/cost-report?date_from=2026-10-01&date_to=2026-10-31" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_your_scoped_key"

{project} is your project’s UUID; it must be the same project your key belongs to — a different project, even one you also own, returns 404. Dates use YYYY-MM-DD, the range can’t exceed 366 days, and an invalid or reversed range returns a 400 error instead of a guessed answer.

The response breaks spend down by message category — marketing, utility, authentication, and service — and includes a forecast: for each category, WACRM adds up the estimated spend over the 30 days before today, divides by 30 (days with no data count as zero), and multiplies by 30 for a next-30-days estimate, marked estimate: true; a category with no data in that window returns null, not 0. The report covers WhatsApp messages only: SMS, Messenger, and Instagram sends and failed messages aren’t counted, and messages sent before cost tracking began aren’t included. Every figure here is built from WACRM’s own placeholder estimate rates, which can differ significantly from what Meta actually bills — never read them as a confirmed Meta invoice or a price. For Meta’s actual published per-message, per-country rates, see the message pricing guide.

What works today / what needs WACRM

Ready to put this in place for your own number? Request early access to get a Workspace, or have WACRM’s team configure consent capture and cost monitoring for you with Quick Setup.