There isn't one WhatsApp message limit — there are three
Searches for "how long can a WhatsApp message be" usually get one number as an answer, but the real figure depends on which WhatsApp you mean. The regular WhatsApp consumer app (the one on your personal phone) allows up to 65,536 characters in a single message — roughly 10,000 words, far more than anyone actually types. The WhatsApp Business Platform (the API businesses like Ferbz use to send automated bills and reminders) is stricter: a free-form reply inside an active customer conversation is capped at 4,096 characters, and a pre-approved template message — the kind used for reminders, OTPs, and bills — is capped at 1,024 characters in its body.
Why the business limit is so much lower
Meta caps template messages at 1,024 characters because templates are reviewed and approved in advance, and short, scannable templates get approved faster and perform better. A 1,024-character limit is not a technical ceiling so much as a design constraint: it forces businesses to write reminders and bills that a customer can read in the 2-3 seconds they glance at a notification. If your draft template gets rejected for length, the fix is almost always to move detail (full itemised bill, T&Cs) into a linked PDF or a follow-up message rather than cramming it into the template body.
"How many messages can I send on WhatsApp Business" is really a rate question, not a length question
This phrase usually means one of two things: how long a single message can be (covered above), or how many separate messages a business account can send in a day — which is governed by WhatsApp's messaging tiers, not message length. New Business Platform accounts start capped at 250 business-initiated conversations per rolling 24 hours, and unlock 1,000, then 10,000, then 100,000+ as the account's quality rating improves. A business sending short, relevant, opted-in messages climbs these tiers within weeks; a business sending long, unsolicited broadcasts gets throttled regardless of message length.
What this means for your bills and reminders
In practice, a follow-up reminder or a bill notification should stay well under the 1,024-character template limit — Ferbz's default templates run 80-150 characters because that's what customers actually read and reply to. If you need to send a genuinely long document (a full itemised GST invoice, a multi-item order summary), send it as an attached PDF or image with a short WhatsApp message pointing to it, rather than trying to fit the whole thing into template text. That keeps you inside every limit at once and reads better on a phone screen.