The twelve
WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Threads, Threema, email, your shared team mailbox, the website chat widget, SMS, voice with numbers in 60+ countries, and internal team chat. Those are the channels BootDesk connects today, each live one metered at 1.000 BDK (about €1) a month. Not "40+ integrations" where half are webhooks with a marketing name — twelve, each properly wired: identity resolution against known contacts, inbound history, outbound replies, and the assistant able to work them under the same rules.
Why count them out one by one? Because the omnichannel market runs on inflated channel counts. When a vendor claims every channel, what they usually have is a webhooks page. A real channel is a two-way contract: the customer's history travels in, your answers travel out, and the thread stays whole in between. That contract is expensive to keep for each network — different APIs, different rules, different ways to break. We would rather do twelve for real than forty on paper.
What "one thread" actually requires
Unification is not a shared inbox with colored channel icons. The engineering is in the join:
Identity. The same human emails from gmail, messages from WhatsApp registered to their phone, and writes from the website widget. BootDesk resolves those to one customer — you see one profile with one history, not three strangers.
Context. When the WhatsApp conversation continues ticket #4312 that started as an email, the answering human (or assistant) sees the email. Not a link to it. The content, inline, in the thread.
Continuity rules. This is where threading meets channels: on messaging surfaces the assistant is informed of the customer's open tickets and can connect the conversation to them. If a channel runs without an agent, the customer gets a choice — continue an open conversation or start fresh. Same rules everywhere, because they are product rules, not channel quirks.
The WhatsApp bill, without fog
Nobody in this industry likes talking about WhatsApp money, so here it is. Meta charges per-template fees for business-initiated messages — categorized as utility, authentication or marketing, varying by country and category (Twilio, which resells the same Meta rails, lists utility and authentication templates from $0.0034/message plus its own $0.005 handling fee). Inside the 24-hour customer-service window opened by the customer's own message, replies and utility messages are free — marketing templates never are.
Our rule: carrier fees pass through at cost plus 5% — the same 5% we add on the voice side over Twilio. You see the line. If Meta raises prices, your invoice shows the raise; if you send mostly inside the service window, you mostly pay nothing. We will not build a business on hiding a per-message tax inside a platform fee. A helpdesk that marks up your WhatsApp costs 400% and calls it "platform pricing" is betting you never do the math.
The other direction: outbound
Support is not only answering. "Your order shipped", "your appointment is confirmed", "your invoice is attached" — outbound notifications, from one API endpoint, through whichever channel is connected: SMS, email, WhatsApp, Telegram. Messages queue, get tracked, and land in the customer's history like any other thread. One endpoint, one auth, any channel. It is the feature every team asks for in week two, so it shipped in month one.
PII before AI
One more thing every channel shares: before any AI call — assistant reading a thread, token meter ticking — personal data is masked. Card numbers, national IDs, whatever your tenant marks as sensitive: replaced before a model ever sees the text. The channels are separate networks; your customers' data should not leak between them, and it does not.