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WhatsApp CRM Software: A 2026 Buyer’s Guide

What WhatsApp CRM software really costs in India, which parts of your setup are portable, and the lock-in no comparison page mentions.

Every comparison of WhatsApp CRM software is the same page. Ten tools, a feature grid, a price starting from, and a closing line about how the best one depends on your needs.

Read fifteen of them and you still cannot answer the only question that matters two years from now: if this tool turns out to be wrong, what can you take with you?

That question has a specific and unpleasant answer in this category, and almost nobody prints it. Your WhatsApp number is portable. Meta designed it that way, and moving it between providers is a well-documented process that keeps your templates, your quality rating and your verified business name. But the part that makes the software a CRM — the conversation history, the contact notes, the pipeline stages, the automation you spent three months tuning — is not portable at all. It lives in the vendor’s database in the vendor’s format, and there is no standard for exporting it.

So the feature grid is not the decision. The decision is which parts of your setup you are willing to rebuild later, and what you are paying now for the privilege.

This guide covers what WhatsApp CRM software actually does, the four different products sold under that name, what it costs in India in August 2026, what genuinely moves when you switch, and how to evaluate one without buying a migration project.

In this guide

What WhatsApp CRM software actually is

A CRM is a record of relationships. A WhatsApp CRM is a record of relationships where the conversation happens on WhatsApp instead of email or a phone log.

That sounds like a small difference. It is not, because of one property: WhatsApp conversations are continuous. An email thread ends. A support ticket closes. A WhatsApp thread with a customer you sold to in March is still open in August, still on the same screen, still scrolled to the last thing either of you said. The channel has no natural boundaries, which is exactly why it needs software.

In practice a WhatsApp CRM does six jobs:

  1. Puts more than one person on one number. A phone can hold one WhatsApp account. A team of six cannot share a phone. This is the single most common reason businesses start looking.
  2. Turns chats into records. Contact fields, tags, notes, deal value, source — attached to the thread rather than living in someone’s memory.
  3. Assigns and routes. Who owns this conversation, what happens when they are on leave, what happens when nobody replies for four hours.
  4. Tracks a pipeline. New enquiry, qualified, quoted, won, lost — visible across the team rather than inferred from unread badges.
  5. Automates the repetitive parts. First reply, business-hours acknowledgement, follow-up reminders, canned answers for the eight questions you get every day.
  6. Reports. Response time, conversations per agent, conversion by source, and revenue attributed to the channel.

Notice that only one of those six is about sending messages. That is the difference between a WhatsApp CRM and WhatsApp marketing software: marketing software is built outward around campaigns, a CRM is built inward around the relationship. Most mature products now claim both, and the useful question is which one the product was designed for first, because that is where its reporting and automation will actually be good.

Four products, one name

Four genuinely different things are sold as WhatsApp CRM software. Comparing prices across them is meaningless, and it is the most expensive confusion at this stage.

The WhatsApp Business app. Free, one device, aimed at a one-person business. It has labels, quick replies and a catalogue. It has no team access, no pipeline, no assignment and no reporting. It is a good product that is not a CRM, and it does not grow into one.

A browser extension over WhatsApp Web. Installs alongside the WhatsApp Web session you already use and adds a CRM layer on top: contact fields, notes, pipeline stages, bulk contact saving, quick replies, follow-up reminders. It uses your own account, so there is no per-message fee and no template approval. It is genuinely useful for small sales teams and it is what most Indian SMBs actually adopt first. We keep a separate breakdown of WhatsApp CRM extensions for Chrome.

An official API platform. Software built on Meta’s WhatsApp Business API. You get a shared inbox, template messaging, chatbots, webhooks and proper analytics. You pay a platform fee plus Meta’s per-message charge. Everything with serious automation sits here.

A general CRM with a WhatsApp add-on. HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, Odoo, Pipedrive and the rest bolt WhatsApp onto an existing CRM through a marketplace app or a partner integration. The CRM is excellent and the WhatsApp layer is usually thin. We have measured each one separately, starting with Zoho, HubSpot and Salesforce.

A ₹999-a-month extension and a ₹3,599-a-month API platform are not two prices for the same thing. They are two different architectures with different failure modes.

Extension or official API: the honest version

This fork is where most buying advice becomes marketing. The standard line is that extensions get you banned and the official API does not, so pay for the API. That is not wrong, but it is imprecise enough to be useless, and it pushes small teams into spending they do not need.

Here is the accurate version. Meta’s enforcement follows sending behaviour, not the shape of your software. What gets numbers banned is unsolicited outbound at volume: identical message bodies fired at hundreds of people who never asked, from a number they do not recognise, producing blocks and spam reports. Meta detects that through the block rate and the send pattern. It does not need to know what tool you used.

That means the risk profile splits along a line that is not the one vendors draw:

Low risk. A four-person sales team using an extension to organise conversations that customers started — labelling threads, saving contacts, adding notes, sending individual replies, following up with people who enquired. This is a productivity layer over normal human messaging. Volume is low, consent is real, blocks are rare.

High risk. Any tool, extension or otherwise, used to blast a purchased list. Reverse-engineered unofficial API libraries driving thousands of automated sends a day are the clearest case, and they are what the ban statistics are actually measuring.

So the fork is not “safe versus unsafe”. It is closer to this:

Extension over WhatsApp Web Official API platform
Best for Small sales teams organising inbound chats Teams needing outbound at scale, chatbots, integrations
Per-message cost None Meta’s rate per template message
Template approval Not required Required before any outbound
Multi-agent Limited, per-device Native, unlimited agents on one number
Automation depth Reminders, canned replies Full flows, webhooks, chatbot, CRM sync
Risk driver Your sending behaviour Your sending behaviour
Green tick eligible No Yes

Choose the extension when your WhatsApp is mostly inbound and your team is small. Choose the API when you need to start conversations at volume, run a chatbot, or connect WhatsApp to other systems. If you are trying to do the second with an unofficial tool because it is cheaper, read how to send bulk WhatsApp messages without getting banned before you send anything.

If you are choosing rather than reading, Lion CRM covers both sides of this fork — a Chrome extension for teams working out of WhatsApp Web, and an official-API platform for teams that have outgrown it. See the platform.

What you actually pay: two meters

Every advertised price for WhatsApp CRM software is one meter. On the official API there are always two.

Meter one — the platform fee. What the vendor charges monthly. In India this runs from roughly ₹999 to ₹15,000 a month depending on tier, scaling on seats, contacts, or both. Extensions sit at the bottom of that range and usually charge per user with no second meter at all.

Meter two — Meta’s per-message charge. Billed per delivered template message, priced by category. This scales with volume, so it is invisible in a pilot and dominant at scale.

Most vendors add a markup on Meta’s rate — commonly ten to thirty percent — and most do not print it. A vendor advertising zero markup is making a claim worth verifying against a real invoice, not a pricing page.

Then 18% GST applies to both, because these services are classified as OIDAR in India. If you are GST-registered it is recoverable as input tax credit, so it is a cash-flow cost rather than a real one. It is still missing from nearly every rate card, so a budget built from a rate card is 18% light before markup.

The practical rule for a CRM specifically: most CRM usage is inbound and low-volume, so the platform fee usually dominates. That is the opposite of marketing software, where the message bill dominates. It is why per-seat pricing hurts more in this category than per-message pricing does — until 1 October, which we will come to.

What it costs in India right now

Meta bills per message, not per conversation — that changed on 1 July 2025 and plenty of advice online still assumes the old model. India rates as of August 2026:

Category Meta rate per message What it covers
Marketing ₹0.8631 Offers, launches, re-engagement, anything promotional
Utility ₹0.115 Order updates, reminders, transactional notices
Authentication ₹0.115 OTPs and verification codes
Service Free until 30 Sep 2026 Free-form replies inside an open 24-hour window

For a CRM workload the important line is the last one. A shared inbox mostly sends service messages, and service messages are free today. That is why a CRM’s Meta bill is usually small and its platform bill is usually not.

Typical India platform fees, August 2026:

Tier Monthly What you generally get
Extension / entry ₹499–₹1,500 per user WhatsApp Web layer, contacts, notes, reminders
SMB API ₹999–₹3,599 Shared inbox, templates, basic automation, a few agents
Growth API ₹3,599–₹7,999 Chatbot builder, integrations, API access, more agents
Business / agency ₹8,000–₹17,000 Multi-number, roles, white-labelling, SLA

There is a trap inside the category system that also bites CRMs. Meta assigns the category when it approves your template, and it does not always agree with what you intended. A follow-up reminder that mentions a discount becomes a marketing template and bills at 7.5 times the utility rate. Nothing in most dashboards flags this. Auditing your approved templates for category drift takes an afternoon and is usually the largest single saving available. The full arithmetic is in the WhatsApp Business API pricing guide.

1 October 2026 turns your inbox into a cost centre

On 1 October 2026, Meta starts charging for service messages — the free-form replies your team sends inside the 24-hour window after a customer writes to you. Today they cost nothing. Meta has said the direction; the India rates are expected to be published before 1 September, so anyone quoting you a precise number today is guessing.

This lands harder on CRMs than on any other category of WhatsApp software, and the reason is structural. A CRM’s core workload is exactly the thing that becomes billable. Campaign tools send a few thousand template messages and stop. A shared inbox sends free-form replies all day — clarifications, quotes, “let me check”, “yes we have that in stock”. Those are service messages.

Do the arithmetic on your own volume before October. A ten-agent team handling forty conversations each per day at six agent messages per conversation is 2,400 outbound service messages a day, or roughly 52,000 a month. At any plausible rate that is a new line item that did not exist in your last budget.

Three things change from a buying perspective:

  • Messages per conversation becomes a metric you care about. Today nobody measures it. From October it is a cost driver, and a CRM that cannot report it is hiding your bill from you.
  • Automating the first reply stops being a nice-to-have. Every question a bot answers correctly is an agent message you do not pay for. This is the strongest argument for a WhatsApp AI chatbot that has ever existed, and it arrives in seven weeks.
  • Canned replies get cheaper than typing. Not because of the text, but because a well-designed quick reply resolves in one message what a conversation resolves in four.

Ask any vendor you are evaluating what their plan is for service-message billing, whether they will pass Meta’s rate through at cost, and whether their reporting will break it out. The answers vary enormously and none of them are on the pricing page yet.

Your number is portable. Your CRM data is not.

Here is the part that comparison pages skip, and it is the one that should shape your shortlist.

Meta built number portability into the platform deliberately. Moving a WhatsApp Business number from one provider to another is a defined process, and it preserves more than most people expect: the number itself, your approved message templates, your quality rating, your display name, your Official Business Account status if you have it, and your messaging tier. Done properly it takes three to seven business days, and the number keeps sending and receiving right up until the final registration step. The actual outage is minutes, not days.

So the horror stories about being trapped with a bad provider are, on the number side, mostly out of date.

The lock-in is somewhere else entirely. None of the CRM part comes with you. There is no Meta-defined format for a conversation history, a contact record, a pipeline stage or an automation flow, because Meta does not store any of them — your vendor does, in their own schema. When you leave:

  • Chat history stays behind unless the vendor gives you an export, and most exports are a CSV of message text with the media stripped out.
  • Contact notes, custom fields, tags and lead source usually export, but rarely in a shape the next vendor imports cleanly.
  • Pipeline stages, deal values and stage history frequently do not export at all.
  • Chatbot flows, routing rules, SLA policies and canned-reply libraries never transfer. You rebuild them.
  • Analytics history is gone, so your year-on-year comparison restarts at zero.

That is the real switching cost, and it grows every month you use the product. It is also completely invisible during a trial, which is when you have the most leverage to ask about it.

What actually moves when you switch

Asset Moves to the new provider? Notes
Phone number Yes Core of the migration process
Approved templates Yes Carried across; re-verify wording after
Quality rating Yes Preserved, not reset
Messaging tier / limits Yes Preserved
Display name Yes Preserved
Official Business Account (green tick) Yes Preserved if already granted
WhatsApp Business Account ownership Only if you own it See the next section
Conversation history No Vendor database, export quality varies
Contact records and custom fields Partially Usually exportable, rarely importable cleanly
Pipeline stages and deal history Rarely Often no export at all
Chatbot flows and automation No Rebuild from scratch
Canned replies and templates library Partially Text exports, structure does not
Reporting history No Restarts at zero

Print that table and take it into the demo. Ask the vendor to mark each row. The ones who answer straight away are the ones who have thought about it.

Lion CRM’s whitelabel platform is built so the account is yours, not ours — your WhatsApp Business Account, your number, your data, exportable. That matters more in year two than any feature on this page. See the platform.

Who owns the WhatsApp Business Account

This is the one contractual detail that decides whether the migration above is a process or a negotiation.

Every official-API setup sits under a WhatsApp Business Account, which sits under a Meta Business Portfolio. That portfolio is owned by someone. Two arrangements are common:

You own it. Your Business Manager holds the portfolio, the vendor is added as a partner with access to send on your behalf. If you leave, you remove their access. The migration is yours to run.

The vendor owns it. You are a user inside their portfolio. Convenient at setup — they handle verification, you skip the paperwork. But leaving now requires their cooperation to release the number, and their commercial interest is not aligned with yours on that day.

The second arrangement is extremely common at the cheap end of the market, and it is almost never stated on the pricing page. Ask directly: whose Business Manager holds the WABA, and what is your written process for releasing a number? If the answer is vague, price the vagueness in. We cover the mechanics from the provider’s side in the WhatsApp Business API reseller guide, which is worth reading even as a buyer because it shows you what your vendor’s economics look like.

The seat trap

CRM pricing is per-seat far more often than marketing pricing is, and per-seat pricing interacts badly with how WhatsApp actually gets used.

The problem is that WhatsApp conversations do not respect org charts. A customer asks about an invoice, and now accounts needs to see the thread. A delivery goes wrong and operations needs to reply. A deal gets complicated and the founder wants to read the history. In an email world those people are already licensed because everyone has email. In a WhatsApp CRM, each of them is another seat.

Three patterns to watch for when you price a plan:

  • Read-only access costs a full seat. The person who needs to see conversations but never replies is billed like an agent. Some vendors offer a viewer role; most do not, and it is worth asking.
  • The plan jump is bigger than the seat. Plans often cap agents — five on this tier, fifteen on the next. Adding your sixth agent does not cost one seat, it costs the tier difference. Model your headcount twelve months out, not today.
  • Inactive seats keep billing. Seasonal teams and agencies pay year-round for peak headcount unless the contract allows downgrades mid-term.

The honest comparison is total cost at your realistic twelve-month headcount, including the people who need to read but not write, plus the message bill you will have after October. Not the entry price for three users.

The ten features that matter

Everything else is a preference. These ten change outcomes:

  1. True multi-agent on one number — with assignment, not just a shared login. A shared login has no audit trail and no accountability.
  2. Conversation ownership and handover — including what happens when the owner is unavailable, and whether the customer sees a change.
  3. Contact record attached to the thread — fields, tags, source, order history, visible while replying rather than in another tab.
  4. A pipeline that reflects your sales process — customisable stages, not a fixed funnel someone else designed.
  5. Automated first reply and business-hours handling — the cheapest customer-experience win available, and from October a direct cost control.
  6. Follow-up reminders that survive the agent — tasks attached to the contact, not to a person’s memory.
  7. Search across all history — by contact, by keyword, by tag, going back years. This is the feature people miss most after switching.
  8. Reporting that includes response time and conversion by source — and, from October, messages per conversation.
  9. Data export you can actually use — test it during the trial. Ask for a real export file before you sign.
  10. Integration with the system that holds your money — your billing, your ecommerce store, or your existing CRM. If WhatsApp data never meets revenue data, you cannot prove the channel works.

Five features that demo well and rarely help

AI reply suggestions with no product knowledge. A model that has not read your catalogue writes fluent, confident, wrong answers. Useful only when grounded in your own content.

Sentiment scoring on individual messages. Demos beautifully. Nobody has ever changed a decision because a message scored 0.3 negative.

Unlimited broadcast counts on the plan. The limit is Meta’s, not the vendor’s. Your cap is the messaging tier and your quality rating, and no plan changes either.

A chatbot builder with a hundred blocks. Nearly every business ships between four and eight flows. Builder depth is not the constraint; writing good flow content is.

Native integrations with fifty tools. Count the ones you actually use. Two that work properly beat fifty that exist on a logo wall.

Three teams, three real monthly bills

A four-person real-estate team, mostly inbound. Enquiries arrive from portals and click-to-WhatsApp ads. Volume is 600 conversations a month, almost entirely service messages. An extension at ₹799 per user is ₹3,196 a month with no second meter. An API platform would be ₹3,599 plus a small message bill for follow-up templates. Today the extension wins on cost; after 1 October the gap narrows because the API platform can automate first replies and the extension cannot. Sector-specific detail in WhatsApp CRM for real estate.

A twelve-agent ecommerce support desk. 8,000 conversations a month, 4,000 utility template messages for order updates, heavy inbound. Platform: ₹7,999. Meta: 4,000 × ₹0.115 = ₹460, plus roughly 45,000 free service messages today. All in, about ₹10,000 with GST. From October those 45,000 service messages become billable and the bill could double or worse depending on the rate — which is why the chatbot conversation is urgent for this team, not academic.

A thirty-person B2B sales floor. 3,000 conversations a month but long ones, plus 2,000 marketing templates for re-engagement. Platform: ₹14,999 at the seat count. Meta: 2,000 × ₹0.8631 = ₹1,726 plus markup. All in, about ₹20,000 with GST. Here the seat count is 75% of the bill and the message bill is noise — so negotiating seats, not per-message rates, is where the money is.

Three teams, three completely different answers about which meter to optimise. Run your own numbers before you shortlist, not after.

Do you actually need a WhatsApp CRM?

Worth asking honestly, because a good part of this market is sold to businesses that do not have the problem yet.

You probably do not need one if: one person handles all WhatsApp enquiries, you get under thirty conversations a week, and nothing goes wrong when that person is on leave. The WhatsApp Business app with disciplined labels is enough. Buying software here adds a subscription and a login, not capability.

You probably do need one if any of these are true: more than one person needs to reply from the same number; you have lost an enquiry because it sat unread in someone’s phone; you cannot answer how many enquiries came in last month; a salesperson left and their conversations left with them; or you are about to spend money driving traffic to WhatsApp.

That last one is the real trigger. Paid traffic into an unmanaged inbox is how ad budgets disappear quietly.

And if you are being asked to run this for other businesses, the buying decision is different again — you are choosing a platform to resell, where multi-tenancy, branding and margin matter more than any feature above. That is a separate evaluation, covered in whitelabel WhatsApp CRM software and the India comparison.

Questions to ask before you sign

  • Whose Meta Business Portfolio will hold the WhatsApp Business Account — ours or yours?
  • What is your written process, and timeline, for releasing our number to another provider?
  • What is your markup on Meta’s per-message rate, as a percentage?
  • Can I see a real export file — conversations, contacts and pipeline — from a live account before I sign?
  • What is your plan for service-message billing from 1 October, and will you pass Meta’s rate through at cost?
  • Will your reporting break out messages per conversation?
  • Does a read-only user cost a full seat?
  • What happens to our data ninety days after we cancel?
  • Is there a contractual minimum term, and does it include a message allowance we may not use?

The first two decide whether you have a supplier or a landlord. Ask them before you ask about price.

Want to see the whole thing working before you commit? Lion CRM runs on your own WhatsApp Business Account, with a Chrome extension for teams still living in WhatsApp Web and a full official-API platform when you outgrow it. See the platform.

The mistakes that cost the most

Letting the vendor own the WABA. It converts an unhappy renewal into a negotiation you cannot win.

Never testing the export. By the time you need it you have two years of history and no leverage.

Pricing on today’s headcount. Seats are the dominant cost in this category and headcount only goes one way.

Ignoring October. A budget built on free service messages is about to be wrong, and inbound-heavy teams are the most exposed.

Buying a chatbot builder instead of writing flows. The builder is never the constraint.

Treating a shared login as multi-agent. No assignment, no audit trail, no accountability, and one person’s phone still holds the session.

Choosing on the feature grid. Every product in the shortlist has the same grid. They do not have the same answers to the ownership questions.

A 30-day evaluation plan

Week one — measure what you have. Count last month’s WhatsApp conversations, how many people replied, and how many enquiries you can trace to revenue. Most teams cannot do the third, which is itself the finding. Note your realistic headcount twelve months out, including read-only users.

Week two — shortlist three and ask the hard questions. Use the list above. Get the markup and the WABA ownership answer in writing. Ask each for a sample export file. Two of the three will take longer than expected to produce one, and that tells you something.

Week three — pilot on one real team. Not a sandbox. One team, real conversations, for a full week. Get business verification started immediately if you are going the API route, because it takes longer than any other setup step and it moves you from 250 to 2,000 unique contacts a day.

Week four — model the bill twice. Once at today’s rates, once assuming service messages are billable. If the second number changes your answer, choose the tool that automates the first reply well, not the one that is cheaper today.

Do that and you end the month with a tool chosen on switching cost and total bill rather than on a feature grid — which is roughly how the decision will be judged in two years, whether or not you made it that way.

Frequently asked questions

What is WhatsApp CRM software?
It is software that turns WhatsApp into a managed sales and support channel: multiple agents replying from one business number, contact records and notes attached to each conversation, a pipeline showing where every enquiry stands, automated first replies and follow-up reminders, and reporting on response time and conversion. It comes in two main architectures — a browser extension layered over WhatsApp Web, or a platform built on Meta’s official WhatsApp Business API.

How much does WhatsApp CRM software cost in India?
Extension-style tools run roughly ₹499–₹1,500 per user per month with no per-message fee. Official-API platforms run roughly ₹999–₹17,000 a month depending on tier, plus Meta’s per-message charge, plus a vendor markup that is commonly ten to thirty percent, plus 18% GST on both. Because CRM workloads are mostly inbound, the platform fee usually dominates the bill rather than the message charge.

Is a WhatsApp CRM different from WhatsApp marketing software?
Yes. Marketing software is built outward around campaigns — templates, segments, broadcasts and campaign reporting. A WhatsApp CRM is built inward around the relationship — contact records, assignment, pipeline stages, conversation history and follow-up. Many products now claim both, so the useful question is which one the product was designed for first, because that is where its automation and reporting will be strongest.

Can I move my WhatsApp number to a different CRM provider later?
Yes. Meta supports migrating a number between providers, and the process preserves the number, your approved templates, your quality rating, your display name, your messaging tier and your Official Business Account status. It usually takes three to seven business days with only a few minutes of actual downtime at the final registration step. The catch is that your conversation history, pipeline data and automation flows do not move — those live in the vendor’s database.

What gets left behind when I switch WhatsApp CRM providers?
Typically the conversation history beyond whatever export the vendor provides, pipeline stages and deal history, chatbot flows, routing and SLA rules, canned-reply libraries, and all your reporting history. Contact records and custom fields usually export but rarely import cleanly into the next tool. That accumulated setup, not the phone number, is the real switching cost.

Who should own the WhatsApp Business Account, me or the vendor?
You should. If your own Meta Business Portfolio holds the WhatsApp Business Account, the vendor is a partner you can remove, and any future migration is yours to run. If the vendor owns it, leaving requires their cooperation to release the number at exactly the moment your interests diverge. Ask whose Business Manager holds the account before you ask about pricing.

Are WhatsApp CRM Chrome extensions safe to use?
Risk in this category tracks sending behaviour rather than the type of tool. A small team using an extension to organise conversations customers started — labelling, noting, replying individually, following up on enquiries — is normal messaging with a productivity layer, and blocks are rare. Blasting a purchased list with automated identical messages is what triggers bans, and it triggers them whatever software sends them. If you need outbound at volume, use the official API and collect real opt-in.

What changes for WhatsApp CRMs on 1 October 2026?
Meta starts charging for service messages — the free-form replies your team sends inside the 24-hour window after a customer writes to you. Those are free today and they are the bulk of a CRM’s traffic, so inbound-heavy teams are the most exposed. Messages per conversation becomes a cost metric, automating the first reply becomes a direct saving, and any vendor you are evaluating should be able to tell you how they will bill it and report it.

Do I need the WhatsApp Business API to use a WhatsApp CRM?
Not always. Extension-based CRMs run on your existing WhatsApp account and need no API access, no template approval and no per-message fee, which suits small inbound-heavy teams. You need the official API once you want several agents on one number with proper assignment, outbound template messaging at volume, a chatbot, webhooks, the green tick, or integrations with other systems.

How many agents can share one WhatsApp number?
On the official WhatsApp Business API there is no platform limit on agents sharing a number — the limit is whatever your CRM vendor’s plan allows, which is why seat pricing matters so much in this category. The free WhatsApp Business app supports one primary device with a small number of linked devices and has no assignment or audit trail, so it is not a real multi-agent solution.

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