One WhatsApp number, your whole team

How many users and devices can share one WhatsApp number?

WhatsApp itself allows one phone plus up to four linked companion devices on a number: WhatsApp Web, the desktop app or a business tool. Since multi-device, a linked device keeps working while the phone is offline. So WhatsApp Business can be used on more than one screen, up to four, but every one of them acts as the same user.

Spun takes one of those four linked slots. Your team is not counted in devices behind it: every teammate has their own Spun login, on whichever browsers and phones they use, and the number keeps its other slots for WhatsApp Web or the desktop app.

Related: WhatsApp Business on multiple devices, phones and users

See who is handling what, while it is happening

The question a shared inbox has to answer all day is "is anyone on this?". Spun answers it live rather than with a status field someone has to remember to set. When a teammate opens a conversation, their initials appear on that row in the chat list for everyone else, grey while they are reading and amber the moment they start typing. Inside the conversation the header says it in words, "Maria is viewing" or "Maria and James are replying".

If you start a reply while a colleague is already typing one, an amber line above your message box says so by name. It is a warning, not a lock: you can still send, because sometimes the right answer is that both of you know what is going on. The marker disappears when they leave the chat or switch tabs, and you never see your own presence, only other people's.

After the fact, every outgoing message carries the name of the teammate who sent it, shown above the bubble inside Spun. The customer sees none of this. Nothing is added to the message they receive, no name, no signature, no "sent via". To them it is simply the business replying from the number they know.

• Spread new conversations across the team with a rotation: each teammate gets a personal name label, and every new incoming one-to-one chat receives the next person's label in turn. You set the order, a weight from 1 to 20 for people who should get more, each person's working hours in their own time zone, and a pause until a date for someone who is away. Group chats and conversations you started yourself are left out. The rotation applies a label, which any filter or view can use; it does not lock a chat to a person or cap anyone's load.
• Set a first-response target in minutes, optionally counting business hours only and warning at a percentage of the target. Every member sees the live countdown on each waiting chat, and managers can review the history of targets that were missed.
• A leaderboard on the dashboard shows, per teammate, messages sent, conversations touched, average first response time and the share of replies inside the target.

What the team shares and what stays yours

The rule of thumb is simple. Anything that belongs to the conversation or to the business is shared by everyone with access to it. Anything that is about how you personally like to work stays yours. The table spells out the line, because a few of the shared items surprise people the first time.

The one worth reading twice is the unread state. The unread count, archive, pin and mute on a customer conversation belong to the conversation, not to the person looking at it. When a teammate opens a chat, it stops being unread for everyone, the same way it would if the phone itself had been picked up. That is deliberate: a shared inbox with five private unread counts is five people all thinking someone else has it.

Four roles, from read-only to full control

When you share the inbox you pick one of four roles for the person. The three scoped roles, Viewer, Team Member and Manager, only ever see the part of the inbox you share with them (the next section explains how that slice is defined). Full Control is the whole inbox, identical to your own access, and is the only role that can invite or remove people, see billing, or open the WhatsApp connection screen.

The roles are enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface. A Viewer who finds the send button in a browser tool still cannot send; a Team Member who calls the contacts endpoint directly still gets a refusal. The chart shows the defaults for each role. When you share, you can also switch individual permissions on or off for that specific person, so "a Team Member who may also edit contacts" is a normal thing to set up.

• Viewer: reads the shared chats and contacts inside them, uses Team Chat, takes no action on a customer.
• Team Member: everything a Viewer has, plus sending, scheduling, AI-assisted replies and archiving, inside the shared slice.
• Manager: everything a Team Member has, plus contacts, shared labels, alarms for the team, payment reminders, campaigns, auto-replies, automations, tasks and the dashboard, still inside the shared slice.
• Full Control: the entire inbox with nothing held back, including the team itself, billing and the WhatsApp connection.

Partial access: share a slice of the inbox, not all of it

Most teams do not want every person to see every conversation. A freelancer handling one product line, an accountant who only needs the invoicing chats, a new hire on a trial: each should see their part and nothing else. In Spun the slice is defined by saved filters, the same filters you already use to narrow the chat list. Share a filter with a person and the conversations that match it are the conversations they have. Share two filters and they have the union. Share none and they see nothing at all, which is exactly what the wizard will tell you before it lets you finish.

Because a stage on a pipeline board is a label under the hood, sharing a board is the same mechanism: the person sees the conversations on that board and no others. Labels, pipeline stages, and any other criterion a saved filter can express all work as a boundary. Scoped members with the Viewer or Team Member role also see contact details only for the people in their chats, never the full contact list.

Partial access is available with every paid plan, on every scoped role. It cannot be combined with Full Control, since Full Control means the whole inbox by definition. Access has no expiry date; it lasts until you change the role or remove the person, and both take effect on their next request.

1. 1

   Who

   Type an email address or a phone number, or pick a contact. The person does not need a Spun account yet.

2. 2

   Role

   Choose Viewer, Team Member, Manager or Full Control, and adjust individual permissions if the default is not quite right.

3. 3

   Pipeline

   Optionally share a pipeline board, which becomes a filter over that board's stages.

4. 4

   Filters

   Pick the saved filters that define their slice. Full Control skips this step, since it has no slice.

5. 5

   Review

   See the whole grant in one place before it goes out.

Inviting people and taking access away

An invitation is a link. Send it by email, or, since the person you are inviting is probably already in your WhatsApp, send it to them from your own number in one tap or copy it to paste wherever you like. The link is valid for seven days, an inbox can have up to twenty invitations waiting at once, and re-inviting someone simply issues a fresh link. Whoever opens it accepts with whatever account they sign in with, so a colleague who uses Apple's hidden email addresses, or who signs up for Spun that minute, still lands in the right inbox.

Accepting an invitation never touches the person's own workspace. If they already run their own Spun inbox, yours is added beside it. Removing someone is one action in the Team panel, and it is thorough: their membership ends at once, and anything they set up under it goes with it, including a Gmail sending identity they connected, any home connection they were hosting for the inbox, and any API access they held. You cannot remove yourself, so an inbox is never left without its owner.

Related: How Spun connects to WhatsApp · Security at Spun

What a shared inbox in Spun deliberately does not do

A page that lists only the good parts is a page you cannot plan around. These are the boundaries as they stand, stated plainly so nobody discovers them on day two.

• There is no "assign this conversation to Maria" button and no owner field on a chat. Spun shows who is on a conversation right now and lets a rotation label new chats by person; it does not make one person the owner of a chat.
• Nothing stops two people replying at once. The amber warning tells you a colleague is typing; it does not lock the conversation.
• The customer never sees which teammate answered. Attribution is internal only.
• Unread, archive, pin and mute are per conversation, not per person. One member reading a chat clears it for the team.
• A team note can be written and deleted but not edited; write a new one instead.
• Access has no expiry date and there is no per-member activity log. What you have is the name on every sent message, the name on every note, and the leaderboard.
• A second WhatsApp number is a separate inbox under the same account, with its own member list, rather than a second number inside this one.

Pricing: team members are free

Spun does not charge per person. Team members are unlimited and cost nothing extra, so the tenth teammate costs the same as the first. Sharing your inbox out is included on every paid plan, with all four roles on each. During the free trial you can join someone else's inbox; sharing your own starts with a paid plan.

Related: Plans and pricing

Setting it up, step by step

The Spun docs walk through sharing an inbox screen by screen. If your team mostly answers support questions, see WhatsApp as a helpdesk; for a worked example of a small business running on one number, see the small-teams use case.

Related: Docs: sharing your inbox with the team · WhatsApp helpdesk · WhatsApp for small teams · Guide: WhatsApp customer support for a small team · Guide: share a WhatsApp Business account with your team · Guide: WhatsApp for teams in India

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