Every message is billed at the rate of its category, and the category is a property of the message, not of your account or your plan.
The four categories
| Category | What it is |
|---|---|
marketing | Promotions, offers, announcements, re-engagement. The most expensive category almost everywhere. |
utility | Messages about a transaction the customer has already made: order confirmations, shipping updates, appointment reminders. |
authentication | One-time passcodes and login verification. |
service | Free-form replies to a customer who wrote to you first. Free today; billable from October 1, 2026. |
The two variants
Two more values show up in real billing data.
authentication_international is its own rate, separate from ordinary authentication. Sending an OTP across a border is priced differently from sending one domestically, and in some corridors the gap is large. If you send verification codes internationally, this is a line item worth looking at on its own.
marketing_lite is a distinct category that Meta reports, but which bills against the marketing rate. If you record categories yourself, keep the two apart: the observed category tells you how Meta classified the send, even when the price resolves to the same number.
You don't choose the category
You propose a category when you submit a template. Meta approves it, or reclassifies it. And Meta can reclassify a template that has been running for months.
A template you built as utility and budgeted as utility can be moved to marketing because the copy drifted toward promotion. Nothing breaks and messages keep sending. The only symptom is a bigger bill.
Vera Market
Their three order templates are all utility. If the “order delivered” template, at 50,000 sends a month, were reclassified as marketing, roughly a third of their billed volume would jump to the higher rate overnight, with no code change on their side and nothing that looks like an alert.
So watch the category you're actually billed under. Chapter 2.3 covers how.