WhatsApp auto reply: greeting and away messages, quick replies, and what the free app can't do

Faisal Ansari runs a five-person mobile and laptop repair shop in Bhopal. Messages reach the shop number from eight in the morning until past midnight: “screen price for Redmi Note”, “laptop ready?”, “do you have the original charger”. The two technicians answer between repairs, the counter answers when it isn’t billing, and after nine at night nobody answers at all. He wants a WhatsApp auto reply so that a customer at 11 pm hears something other than silence.

The free WhatsApp Business app does part of this, in about ten minutes. It stops at a very specific point, and most of the frustration with “WhatsApp autoresponders” comes from expecting it to go further. This guide covers the three automations in the app as WhatsApp’s help centre describes them, eight messages worth copying, where the line sits, and what the step beyond it costs.

The three automations in the free WhatsApp Business app

All three live under the Tools tab, all three are free, and all three run from the business phone, which the help centre says must have an active internet connection for the messages to go out. (Terms such as Business app, Platform and service message are in our glossary.)

Greeting message: once per customer, then not for 14 days

A greeting message goes to a customer who messages you for the first time, and again if they message after 14 days of inactivity in that chat. A regular who writes every week never sees it twice. That is the thing to understand before you write one: it is not a reply to every message, it is a one-time introduction.

You choose who gets it: everyone, everyone not in your address book, everyone except contacts you pick, or only contacts you pick. “Everyone not in address book” is the setting most shops want, since saved customers already know who you are.

WhatsApp’s troubleshooting list is short and worth keeping: the greeting is automatically disabled when Meta Business Agent is connected, so if you have switched on Meta’s AI in the app, the greeting won’t send until you delete the agent; a recipient setting may be excluding the person; the customer may have messaged within the last 14 days; and the usual toggle off and on, update, restart.

Away message: on the schedule you set

An away message tells a customer you’re busy or away, and it fires on a schedule rather than by who is writing. The three options are always send, a custom schedule, and “outside of business hours”, which only appears once you have entered business hours in your business profile. Recipients use the same four choices as the greeting.

Fill in the business hours first. Faisal’s shop opens 10 am to 8 pm, Monday to Saturday, and “outside of business hours” covers the nights and Sundays without a second schedule. The help page doesn’t say how often the away message repeats to the same customer inside a schedule, so test it from a second phone before you rely on it.

Quick replies: a shortcut, not an automation

Quick replies are saved messages behind a keyboard shortcut. Type / in the message box and the list appears; pick one, edit it if needed, send. They can carry images or videos, though the help centre notes media in quick replies isn’t supported on WhatsApp Web or desktop. The app also creates default replies from your business profile, such as your hours and address, which is one more reason to fill the profile in.

The limits, from WhatsApp’s page on why a quick reply won’t save: 50 stored quick replies at most, shortcuts of up to 25 characters starting with / and containing no spaces, up to three keywords per reply, each up to 15 letters or digits. A deleted quick reply can’t be recovered, and WhatsApp itself suggests keeping a copy outside the app.

Nothing about a quick reply is automatic. A person chooses it. In practice it is the most used of the three, because it works all day, and the thing that stops people using it is a badly named shortcut. Name them by what the customer asked: /price, /ready, /hours, /upi.

Labels help here too, up to 20 of them, to mark chats “quoted”, “ready” or “parts ordered” so that the follow-up isn’t forgotten. WhatsApp’s page says labels are becoming lists, rolling out gradually, so the name may differ on your phone.

Eight greeting and away messages for Indian trades

The pattern is the same every time: say who you are, say when a person will reply, and give one thing the customer can do now so the wait isn’t wasted. Keep it under about forty words. Write it the way your customers write, in Hindi or Hinglish if that is what arrives. Leave out “we value your message”.

Repair shop, greeting:

Hi, this is Ansari Mobile and Laptop Care, Bhopal. Send your phone or laptop model and the problem, and we'll reply with a price and a time by the next working hour. Open 10 am to 8 pm, Monday to Saturday.

Pharmacy, away message at night:

Hello from Noor Medicos, Lucknow. We're closed until 8 am. For a prescription, send a photo now and we'll confirm stock first thing. For an emergency, please go to the nearest hospital rather than waiting on this chat.

Chartered accountant, greeting:

Hello, Deshpande and Associates here. Tell us the service you need (ITR, GST, TDS) and the name on the PAN, and we'll reply within one working day. Please don't send Aadhaar numbers or bank passwords on chat.

Tiffin service, away message on Sunday:

Thanks for messaging Dolma's Kitchen. Sunday is our day off, so orders placed now go out on Monday. Reply with your area and the number of people and we'll confirm the menu by 9 am Monday.

Coaching centre, greeting:

Welcome to Anusha's Maths Academy, Vijayawada. We run classes 7 to 10 and a JEE foundation batch. For fees and timings, type the class. A counsellor replies between 9 am and 7 pm.

Two-wheeler service centre, away message with a custom lunch schedule:

Chavda Motors, Rajkot: the service desk is on a break until 2:30 pm. Send your vehicle registration and the problem now and we'll give you a slot as soon as we're back.

Boutique, greeting:

Hi from Pillai Handlooms, Kochi. Send a photo or the product code from our Instagram post and your size, and we'll confirm availability and delivery days. We reply 10 am to 7 pm.

Sweet shop, festive away message:

Sen Sweets, Siliguri: it's Diwali week and we're packing orders. For bulk orders over 20 boxes, send the count and the delivery date and we'll confirm by evening. The counter is open until 10 pm.

The accountant’s line about Aadhaar and passwords is there on purpose. A greeting is the one message every new customer reads, so it is the place to say what not to send.

What the app’s auto replies can’t do

The limits are structural, not bugs, and they come from the app being built around one phone.

Nobody is assigned. Every chat still sits in one list; the away message went out, but nothing marks the chat as waiting for the morning shift. Faisal’s “laptop ready?” at 11 pm gets a polite text and is then as easy to miss as it was before.

Nothing is answered. Greeting and away messages are fixed text. They can’t look up the job, read “Redmi Note 13” and quote a screen, or tell a prescription from a complaint.

Nothing fires twice. The greeting waits 14 days; the away message follows its schedule. A customer who writes three times with three different questions gets the same text or none.

The phone has to be on. Both pages say the device needs an active internet connection. If the business phone is off, in a drawer or out of data, no auto reply goes out at all, and the linked laptops don’t send one on its behalf.

Nothing is structured. There are no buttons or lists in the app’s automations, so the customer types free text and a person reads it.

Nothing starts a conversation. None of the three sends first. A reminder to someone who hasn’t written needs a broadcast list, which only reaches contacts who saved your number, or the Platform.

Nothing is counted. The app doesn’t report how many greetings went out or how many of those chats were never answered by a person.

Two more things belong here. Since May 2026 Meta has offered Business AI inside the Business app for eligible Indian small businesses; it answers from your catalogue and profile in Indian languages and lets the owner take over, and WhatsApp’s help centre notes that greeting and away messages are switched off while Meta’s AI agent is connected. We compared it with a Platform AI agent in Meta’s Business AI or an AI agent.

And a warning about the apps that come up when you search for a WhatsApp autoresponder: Android apps that read your notifications and reply, or desktop tools that drive WhatsApp Web. WhatsApp’s page on automated messaging says its products “are not intended for bulk or automated messaging, both of which have always been a violation of our Terms of Service”, and its linked-devices page says linking through unofficial apps or websites, “now or in the past, may result in a temporary or permanent account ban”. The sanctioned route past the app’s three automations is the WhatsApp Business Platform through a provider.

What the same auto reply looks like on the Platform

On the Platform the auto reply is a small workflow you draw rather than a text box you fill in. A message arrives and starts it. A condition checks whether it’s inside business hours, whether this is the customer’s first message, or what they typed. The reply can carry up to three buttons or a list, and the next step depends on what was tapped: tag the contact, assign the chat to a team, send the job-status question, or hand the chat to an AI agent that answers from your documents and website pages and passes it to a person with a summary when it can’t. Our automation guide lists nine of these workflows in the order to build them, and WhatsApp chatbot for business weighs buttons against AI.

Meta adds a little on its side. Its conversational components let you set up to four “ice breakers” of 80 characters each, tappable prompts a customer sees the first time they open a chat with your number, plus slash-style commands, configured in WhatsApp Manager. Meta’s changelog records that the welcome-message feature in conversational components was removed on 27 March 2026, so the first automated message is the reply to the customer’s first message.

TD Tenzin Dolma talking to Ansari Mobile and Laptop Care

1. Tenzin Dolma:
   laptop ready? job slip from tuesday 11:04 pm
2. With the app: the away message says "closed until 10 am" and the chat waits in the list with everything else
3. With the Platform, the same message starts a workflow:
4. Ansari Mobile and Laptop Care:
   Hi Tenzin, the shop is closed for the night, so a person will reply from 10 am. What do you need right now? 11:04 pm
   • Repair status
   • Price for a repair
   • Something else
5. Tenzin Dolma:
   Repair status 11:05 pm
6. Ansari Mobile and Laptop Care:
   Send the job slip number and the service desk will check it first thing and message you before 10:30 am. 11:05 pm
7. Tenzin Dolma:
   JS-2291 11:06 pm
8. Tagged: status query · assigned to Service desk · marked waiting for morning

What it costs

The app’s three automations are free. On the Platform every automated reply is a service message, which Meta has charged since 1 October 2026: the first 1,000 per business number per month are free, and each one after that costs ₹0.115 to Indian numbers, before GST. Replies typed by staff count toward the same 1,000.

Take Faisal’s shop as an illustrative month. About 1,800 customers write in; two automated messages each (the after-hours reply with buttons, then the follow-up) make 3,600, and his team types roughly 2,400 replies on top. That is 6,000 service messages, 1,000 of them free, and 5,000 × ₹0.115 is about ₹575 to Meta before GST, plus the provider’s plan. A workflow that sends four messages where two would do doubles the first part of that. Customer support on WhatsApp covers the routing and reply-time side once the automation has done its part.

Which one should you use

If one or two people answer every chat and most questions are “are you open”, “what’s the price” and “is it ready”, set up the app tonight: greeting for new numbers, away message set to outside business hours, and the ten answers you typed most this week as quick replies. It costs nothing and it is better than silence.

If chats need to reach different people, if the same five questions could be answered without a person, if you want the reply to go out whether or not the phone is on, or if you want to know how many customers were left waiting, the app has stopped being enough, and the ₹575 above is the honest size of the next step.

Whichever you pick, run one count for a week: chats that got the away message and still had no human reply by noon the next day. That number is either the case for the next step or the proof you don’t need one yet.