Does your WeChat Official Account send one message to followers in Sydney and another to followers in Melbourne? Do your VIP members get offers that nobody else sees? If so, you'll want to read this before the end of the year.
Last Thursday, 15 October, the WeChat team put up a short notice on the Official Accounts Platform. From 18 January 2027, Official Accounts and Service Accounts won't be able to send a notification to only part of their audience any more. The reason given is "business adjustment", and that's all the explanation there is.
We came across it while going through the platform notices. It's a few lines long, and when we searched we couldn't find any Chinese tech media covering it yet. If nobody on your team logs into the back end often, it would be very easy to miss.
What the notice actually changes
If you publish from the web dashboard, you'll lose the option to notify a chosen group of followers when a post goes out. You can still notify everyone.
On the developer side, two things go. The tag-based send API will now only accept is_to_all set to true, so you can still call it, but only to send to everyone. And the API for sending to a list of specific OpenIDs (WeChat's ID for each follower) is being retired outright.
So from January, a notification goes to your whole audience or it doesn't go at all. The notice says this applies to every Official Account and Service Account, and it doesn't mention any exceptions for overseas accounts.
Will it affect you?
Probably not, if you're like most of the Australian businesses we work with. A typical account posts once or twice a week and sends every article to every follower. If that's you, nothing really changes.
It's a different story for accounts that have spent time building segments. We're thinking of tourism operators who tag followers by home city, universities that keep prospective students apart from current ones, and brands with a members' club that gets first access to sales. A lot of that targeting isn't done by hand in the dashboard. It runs quietly through a CRM or a membership platform calling these APIs in the background, and whoever owns the account may not even know it's there.
That's the situation we'd worry about most. An integration built by a developer three or four years ago will keep working perfectly until 18 January, and after that those sends will simply fail. Unless someone is watching the error logs, you might not find out for weeks.
Why "just send it to everyone" isn't free
The easy answer is to drop the segments and send everything to everyone. It's not that simple.
Under WeChat's developer documentation, each Service Account follower can receive at most four mass messages a month, and Subscription Accounts get one mass send a day. Tagged sends were a way to reach a small group without spending that allowance on your whole list. Once they're gone, every send has to be worth it for the majority of your followers.
People also get tired of messages that aren't meant for them. Send a Melbourne event invite to followers in Perth and Shanghai a few times and some of them will mute or unfollow you. That's not specific to WeChat, but on a platform where follower numbers are slow to build, it hurts more.
Our guess is that WeChat wants the Official Account to be a single broadcast channel, with anything personal happening somewhere else. That's only a guess, though. The notice doesn't name a replacement, so be wary of anyone telling you they know what's coming next.
What we'd do now
Ask your developer, or whoever supplies your CRM or membership tool, one plain question: does anything we use call /cgi-bin/message/mass/send, or the tag-based send with is_to_all set to false? If they're not sure, keep asking. The deadline lands a few weeks before Chinese New Year, when a lot of China-based dev teams slow right down, so don't leave it until January.
After that it's mostly a case-by-case call. Things like booking reminders and order updates usually belong in template messages or subscription messages on a Service Account anyway, since that's what those tools were designed for. Member-only promotions are harder. Some brands will be fine writing one article for everyone and making the members' offer a section within it. Others will want to move that conversation into a Mini Program or WeCom, where you can still talk to individual customers.
One small thing: don't delete your tags. They're still useful for understanding who follows you, even if you can't send to them after January.
If you'd like us to go through your current setup and tell you what will break, get in touch. And if you're still deciding between a Subscription Account and a Service Account, our Official Account registration page covers the differences, which now matter a little more than they did.
Sources: WeChat Team, announcement on the discontinuation of group notifications and OpenID mass sending (15 October 2026); WeChat developer documentation for mass sending and the OpenID mass-send API.