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Why we built Authevo: WhatsApp OTP for Egypt & MENA

6 min read

If you’ve shipped phone verification in Egypt or the wider MENA region, you already know the pain. SMS one-time codes are costly, delivery is inconsistent, and you often pay full price for messages that never arrive. We built Authevo because the channel users actually live in — WhatsApp — was being ignored by the tools developers had to reach for.

The problem with SMS OTP in MENA

  • Cost — international SMS termination across the region is expensive, and prices swing per country and per carrier.
  • Deliverability — messages get filtered, delayed, or silently dropped, and you rarely learn which.
  • You pay for failure — most providers bill per attempt, so undelivered codes still cost you money.

Why WhatsApp, with Telegram fallback

WhatsApp is the default messaging app for hundreds of millions of people across Egypt and MENA. Delivering a code there means it lands in a channel your users check constantly, with read receipts and far better reliability than SMS. When WhatsApp can’t be reached, Authevo falls back to Telegram automatically — your integration code never changes, and we never touch SMS or email.

Developer-first, and honest about cost

The whole product is two REST endpoints — send a code, verify a code — so you can integrate from any backend without an SDK. And because we charge only for a successful verification ($0.01, with 500 free to start), our incentive is to deliver, not to bill you for retries. As a Meta Tech Provider we run on official WhatsApp infrastructure rather than gray routes.

Security is built in, not bolted on: phone numbers are hashed with SHA-256 and never stored in plaintext, OTP codes are never stored in plaintext, WhatsApp Business tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, and webhooks are signed. That’s the foundation we wanted as developers — so we built it for the region we’re from.