Build a WhatsApp support agent in 5 minutes
Most “build a WhatsApp bot” guides start with a Meta developer account, a webhook server, and an afternoon you don’t have. Here’s the version where a support agent answers your WhatsApp messages before your coffee cools — using exactly what ships in Zapito today.
Minute 1 — describe the agent
After sign-up you land on a dashboard with one big input: describe your support agent. Write something like “Answer shipping and returns questions for my shoe store, hand off to a human when unsure” and hit Build my agent. The AI builder creates the bot and wires the whole flow on the canvas — trigger, agent, knowledge topics, a confidence check, reply and human-handoff branches. It builds a complete first draft immediately and tells you which defaults to tweak; you can drag, rewire, or reconfigure any node by hand afterwards.
Minute 2 — add a model key
Zapito is BYOK-first: your agent runs on your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google key, and Zapito adds 0% markup. Paste a key under Settings → API keys. Saving makes one tiny live model call on your key, so a typo’d key, a key in the wrong field, or a key with no credit fails right there with a specific error — not mid-conversation with a customer. (More on why we built it this way in the BYOK post.)
Minute 3 — talk to it
The flow editor has a built-in test chat that runs the real engine — same code path as production traffic, same model, same knowledge grounding. Ask the questions your customers actually send. Every run shows a trace: which trigger fired, what the agent’s confidence was, which branch the conversation took, what your custom tool returned. If the agent should escalate but doesn’t, drag the confidence threshold up and run it again.
Minute 4 — put it on a phone
Click the WhatsApp trigger and Enable sandbox number — a shared Meta test number, clearly labeled, no business verification required. The Deploy modal shows a wa.me QR code: scan it with your phone, send hi, and your flow answers in WhatsApp. For production you’ll connect a number your business owns — the in-app Connect your own number stepper collects your business details and queues your workspace for Meta Embedded Signup access.
Minute 5 — go live
Hit Deploy. A live bot answers on every channel it’s connected to — the sandbox number, a Telegram bot (paste a BotFather token, connected in under a minute), or the embeddable web widget for your site. Pause it any time from the bot card; paused bots go silent on every channel at once.
A setup checklist on the dashboard tracks all five steps — and it’s derived from what actually exists in your workspace, so it can’t claim progress that didn’t happen. That’s the whole product philosophy in one widget.