Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud
OpenWA for CTOs: Self-Hosted WhatsApp Gateway Trade-Offs
OpenWA is interesting because it brings a familiar self-hosting argument into a channel that many SaaS companies already depend on: WhatsApp. The pitch is attractive. Run your own gateway, keep more control, avoid a black-box vendor layer, and own the logs.
For a CTO, that is not enough. A self-hosted messaging gateway is not a weekend automation script. It becomes customer communication infrastructure.
The right question is not "Can we host it?" The right question is "Are we prepared to own delivery behavior, abuse handling, uptime, evidence, and compliance boundaries?"
