A WhatsApp broadcast list is a feature of the WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business apps that lets you send one message to up to 256 saved contacts at once, with each person receiving it as a normal one-to-one chat rather than a group. Replies come back to you privately. The catch that trips up most food businesses: a contact receives your broadcast only if they have saved your number in their phone. On the WhatsApp Business API the equivalent is a campaign of template messages, which has no 256 cap and no saved-number condition, and which Meta bills per message.
Why it matters
Broadcast lists are the first marketing tool every restaurant on WhatsApp uses, and they are free, which is why a 600-customer list ends up split across three lists maintained by hand. The bigger problem is reach. If half your customers never saved your number, half your broadcast silently goes nowhere and you cannot tell which half. There is also no opt-out button, so an annoyed customer's only option is to block you. The post on the 256 broadcast limit and how to go beyond it explains where lists stop making sense.
Example
A dhaba on the Jaipur highway has 1,200 customer numbers from a year of orders. On the app that is five broadcast lists, and a weekend thali offer means sending the same message five times. If 40 percent of those customers saved the number, about 480 receive it. On the API, the same 1,200 get one template send at well under a rupee each, so under ₹1,200 in Meta charges, delivery does not depend on who saved the number, and the owner can see delivery and reply counts in one place. If 3 percent order at ₹350, that is 36 orders and ₹12,600, against roughly 14 orders from the broadcast lists. The choice between groups, lists and campaigns is laid out in groups vs broadcasts vs API campaigns.
On Tezzu, broadcasts are sent as campaigns from the dashboard on your own number and paid from a prepaid wallet, with no 256 limit.