What Are Cloud and App Marketplace Listings?

A software company can sell through its own website, through a sales team, through resellers, or through a marketplace run by a platform its buyers already use. A marketplace listing is the last of these: a product page, pricing and terms published inside a platform operator's storefront, so customers can find, trial and often buy the product without leaving that platform.

The term covers two quite different things, and mixing them up is the most common mistake. This article separates them, walks through the listing types (including private offers and resale through partners), explains how committed-spend programs change buying behavior, outlines the listing process, and quotes the fees each operator publishes. It closes with the trade-offs. For the wider partner type this belongs to, see independent software vendor.

Two Kinds of Marketplace

The word "marketplace" hides two different mechanisms. One is a procurement channel. The other is an integration directory.

A transactable cloud marketplace is a place where money moves. AWS describes its model plainly: the charge becomes part of the buyer's AWS bill, and after the buyer pays, AWS pays the seller. Microsoft defines a transactable offer as one where Microsoft facilitates the exchange of money for a software license on the publisher's behalf. For the buyer, it's a procurement shortcut. For the seller, it's a billing and collections service, with the operator taking a fee.

An app marketplace is closer to a directory with an install button. HubSpot's listing requirements, for example, ask that an app use OAuth as its sole authorization method and have at least three active, unique installs. Shopify and Atlassian go further and run payments for some apps, which is why they publish revenue-share terms. Whether money flows through the marketplace depends on the operator and the app, so check before assuming.

The categories overlap, and operators change how they work. Treat the table as a way to ask the right question: does this channel move the buyer's money, or only their attention?

Listing Types

A listing isn't one thing. Operators let a vendor choose how a product appears and how it's sold.

Free and bring-your-own-license

The simplest listings don't process payment at all. Microsoft's listing options include Get It Now (Free) and Bring Your Own License (BYOL), where the customer acquires the license from the publisher outside the marketplace. These listings help discovery. They don't earn the transactable benefits, and Microsoft states that BYOL offers are categorized as List because there's no transaction through Microsoft Marketplace. A "Contact Me" listing is a variation: it collects a lead and nothing more.

Public transactable SaaS offers

For SaaS, the operator bills the customer on the vendor's behalf. AWS lists several SaaS pricing models: subscriptions billed by hourly usage, contracts billed in advance, contracts with pay-as-you-go on top, and free. Microsoft's SaaS plans support monthly, annual and multiyear contract durations up to 5 years, with flat-rate, per-user and usage-based pricing. Under usage-based billing, Microsoft's metering service lets a publisher charge for dimensions such as bandwidth, tickets or emails processed, up to a maximum of 30 per offer.

Two details matter in practice. On AWS, once you create a listing and publish it to limited, you can't change the pricing model, so the model is a decision to make before you build. And on Microsoft, the publisher still carries the cloud costs for SaaS: Azure usage is billed to the publisher directly, so infrastructure has to be priced into the license fee.

Private offers

Public pricing rarely matches an enterprise deal. A private offer is a custom price and set of terms, created by the vendor for one named buyer. AWS describes it as a feature where you negotiate pricing and terms with the seller, and the seller creates a private offer for the AWS account that you designate. Microsoft's private plans allow negotiated, deal-specific pricing or custom configurations, and Google's page describes a custom offer for a specific customer that lets them buy at a discount.

Private offers are where marketplaces earn their keep with enterprise buyers. The vendor and customer negotiate the way they always have, and the marketplace just handles paper, billing and payout. Microsoft also lets a publisher customize the term: for SaaS and professional services private offers with absolute pricing, custom contract lengths from 1 to 120 months are available.

Resale through partners

A third pattern routes the sale through a partner. Google's documentation includes a section on reselling, with pages for how an ISV can set up products for resale, manage allowed resellers and configure reseller discounts, and a matching set for the reseller creating private offers for its own customers. This is the marketplace version of the channel models in distributor vs reseller and the channel sales model. The vendor sets the discount, and the partner owns the customer relationship and the deal. If your direct sales team and resellers can both transact the same listing, expect the same friction described in channel conflict.

Committed Spend Drawdown

Many large buyers sign a commitment with a cloud provider: spend a set amount over a term in exchange for better rates. The commitment creates a pool of budget that has to be used, and marketplace purchases can sometimes count against it. That's the main reason enterprise buyers prefer to buy through a cloud marketplace.

Microsoft's documentation is specific. MACC, the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, is a contractual commitment customers make with Microsoft to spend a specific amount on Azure over time, and customers can contribute to it by buying MACC-eligible third-party solutions in Microsoft Marketplace. Four rules follow from the same page:

• An offer must meet all Azure IP Co-sell eligibility requirements to be enrolled.
• Free and BYOL offers aren't considered transactable, so they don't qualify.
• Enrollment applies at the offer level, so every offer for the same product has to be eligible on its own.
• The benefit applies only to licenses used exclusively in Azure, not to hybrid or on-premises deployments.

There's a nuance in the other direction. In Microsoft's billing rules, Azure free credits and Enterprise Agreement monetary commitments can pay for Azure usage but can't be used to pay for publisher software license fees, which is a different mechanism from MACC eligibility. Confirm which one your buyer's contract uses before you promise a drawdown.

For AWS and Google, the operators' documentation describes consolidated billing on the buyer's cloud invoice but gives no drawdown rule we can quote, so we don't state one here. If a drawdown is central to your sales pitch, get the operator's current terms in writing.

The Listing Process

Operators differ in detail, but the steps follow a similar path.

1. Register as a seller or publisher. Google requires Google Cloud Partner Network membership in good standing, a vendor account and a payment profile. Financial setup comes first for any transactable listing: Microsoft's transact option requires a payout account and tax profile.
2. Build the technical integration. A Microsoft transactable SaaS offer must be multitenant, use Microsoft Entra ID for authentication and integrate with the SaaS Fulfillment APIs. For app marketplaces the work is building on the platform's APIs.
3. Pass the review. Google's rules say a product must be production-ready and enterprise-ready, free of malicious code and vulnerabilities, and primarily hosted on Google Cloud. Salesforce's path lists executing a commercial agreement, completing a security review and publishing the listing.
4. Publish and price. Choose the listing type, plans and terms. Private offers come after, one deal at a time.
5. Maintain it. Prices, plans and reviews need upkeep. AWS requires a notification period for price increases on existing subscribers: increases take effect on the first day of the month following a 90-day notification period.

What Operators Publish About Fees

Key Facts: Marketplace Listings

• Microsoft charges a 3% standard store service fee when customers purchase a transact offer from Microsoft Marketplace (Microsoft Learn).
• Microsoft allows a 50% discount on the existing marketplace transaction fee for private offer customer renewals (Microsoft Learn).
• On Shopify's standard rates, developers pay 0% on the first $1,000,000 USD of lifetime gross app revenue and 15% above it (Shopify).
• Atlassian's published revenue share for Jira, Jira Service Management and Confluence apps is 83% for Forge, 75% for Connect and 75% for Data Center from 1 October 2026, down from 84% and 80% for Forge and Connect earlier in the year (Atlassian).
• A Microsoft offer must meet Azure IP Co-sell requirements to count toward a customer's Azure consumption commitment, and free and BYOL offers don't qualify (Microsoft Learn).
• AWS says there is no service fee for free or open-source software made available to customers without charge (AWS).

Fees are prices, and prices change. Every figure below is what the operator's own documentation stated, and each one can be revised without notice. Check the linked page before you build a model on it.

Read the units carefully. Microsoft's 3% is a percentage of the software license fee, not of the Azure infrastructure charge, which Microsoft keeps in full on usage-based offers. Atlassian's figures are what the partner keeps, so 83% is a 17% cut, while Shopify's 15% is the cut. Comparing a headline number across operators without checking the unit can mislead. Where an operator doesn't publish a percentage, ask its partner team for the current figure and confirm it in the agreement.

Trade-Offs

Fees against procurement speed. A marketplace fee reduces gross margin on every transacted dollar, as covered in gross margin. What it buys is a shorter route through the buyer's procurement process, a single invoice and, in some cases, budget that was already committed. If a deal would stall in vendor onboarding without it, the fee may be cheap. If your customers pay by card in minutes, it may not be.

Dependence on the operator. The operator sets the fee, the rules and the program names. Atlassian changed its published rates twice in 2026, on 1 April and again on 1 October, which is a reminder that terms move. A vendor that gets most of its revenue from one marketplace has handed that operator a say over its margin. The usual hedge is to list in more than one place and keep a direct sales path alive.

Review and technical delays. Security reviews, fulfillment-API integration and hosting requirements all take engineering time before the first sale. Google's requirement that products be primarily hosted on Google Cloud excludes some architectures, and Microsoft's SaaS requirements (multitenancy, Entra ID) will exclude products that weren't built that way.

Co-selling is separate from listing. A listing alone doesn't make the cloud provider's sellers recommend you. Co-sell programs have their own requirements, covered for AWS and Microsoft in the independent software vendor article. And credit for a deal that touches the marketplace, a partner and your own sales team is an attribution question to settle before the first deal, not after.

Listings are one channel among several. They sit alongside referral, resale and direct sales in a partner-led growth plan. They work best for B2B products whose buyers already hold large cloud or platform agreements, and least well for low-priced products sold to individuals.

Related Reading

• What is a partner ecosystem?
• What is co-selling?
• What is an OEM partnership?
• What is an independent software vendor?
• Distributor vs reseller
• Referral vs affiliate vs reseller
• Channel conflict
• Partner attribution
• Partner-led growth
• Channel sales model
• Gross margin