WhatsApp Now

WhatsApp Now

Steve on X

WhatsApp makes you save someone as a contact before you can message them, which is a pain for a one-off: a landlord, a delivery driver, a host on the other side of the world. WhatsApp Now is a dial pad that skips that. Type or paste a number, hit send, and you're in a chat with them.

I built it over a few days in August 2020, and I've kept it going since, most recently in May 2026.

WhatsApp Now

Numbers, however they come

It works out your country from where you are, so local numbers just work, using GeoNames, with OpenStreetMap and then your IP as fallbacks. Numbers get cleaned up however they're pasted: wa.me links are unwrapped, a leading 00 becomes a +, and spaces, dashes and brackets disappear. A number without a + that's valid internationally is treated as one, and region codes are checked before you send.

A flag opens a country picker that swaps the dialing code in place, and it can be added to your home screen like an app.

The WhatsApp Now dial pad
The dial pad

Under the hood

  • React and Tailwind, with awesome-phonenumber for parsing and validation

  • Deployed on Vercel, with share cards, and analytics on my own Umami