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WhatsApp permits free-form messages only within 24 hours of the customer’s last inbound message. Outside it — a broadcast, an order update, a payment reminder, anyone who has never written to the merchant — only an approved template may be sent. So a partner running campaigns needs to create and track templates without a merchant logging into anything.
Reading takes channels:read; creating and deleting take channels:write.

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Listing

Returns Meta’s own payload — data[] with each template’s name, status, category, language, components and, when it was refused, rejected_reason. Pass phone_number_id when a merchant holds numbers on more than one WhatsApp Business Account: templates belong to the WABA, not to the merchant.

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Creating

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string
required
UTILITY, MARKETING or AUTHENTICATION. This is what you are billed on, and Meta re-categorises templates it thinks are miscategorised — a marketing message dressed as a utility one gets moved, and priced accordingly.
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string
required
Positional placeholders, {{1}} upward. Every one of them needs a matching entry in example_body_params or Meta rejects the template outright.
201 with Meta’s response, including the template id and its initial status — almost always PENDING. A template Meta refuses at submission comes back 400 carrying their validation error verbatim rather than a flattened one, because their message names the component that was wrong.

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Approval is asynchronous, and slow

A 201 does not mean you can send it. Review takes minutes at best and hours routinely. A campaign scheduled against a template created moments earlier will fail at send time with a channel_rejected naming the template.
The outcome arrives as a webhook:
status is APPROVED, REJECTED, PAUSED or DISABLED. A template can move after approval: Meta pauses one whose recipients repeatedly block or report the sender, and disables it if that continues. Treat PAUSED as a signal about the message, not a glitch — it means people did not want it. Store the status against your own copy and check it before scheduling, rather than listing templates on every send.

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Sending one

Templates are sent through the ordinary message routes, addressed either to a thread or straight to a number:
Positional, in {{1}}, {{2}} order. See Conversations and messaging a number with no thread.

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Deleting

Meta deletes by name, which removes every language version of it. Anything still scheduled against that template starts failing at send time rather than here, so delete deliberately.

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What to build

Store each template’s status locally and update it from template.status_changed. Listing templates before every send costs a Graph call per broadcast and tells you nothing new between approvals.
UTILITY is cheaper than MARKETING, which is why every platform sees merchants labelling promotions as order updates. Meta re-categorises, bills the corrected category, and a merchant whose templates keep being moved attracts quality review. Label it as what it is.
A merchant’s first contact with a customer is always a template. Free-form replies only become available once the customer answers — which is what the 24-hour window in every conversation payload tells you.