“We should be on AWS Marketplace” is a decision most software companies make before anyone has looked at how it works. The concept is easy to agree to in a meeting: your product becomes buyable through AWS, customers pay with their AWS account, you reach budget they have already committed.
What that commits you to is more specific. AWS also reset its listing fees last month, which changes the arithmetic for some product types considerably. Here is the shape of it.
The deal in one paragraph
AWS Marketplace is a transaction channel, not a directory. When a customer buys your product there, AWS collects the money from the customer and disburses it to you, minus a listing fee. The customer pays on their AWS invoice, against their AWS agreement, which is the entire reason the channel is worth anything: procurement that would have taken a quarter now rides on a contract their legal team already signed.
You are still the one with a licence agreement and a support obligation to that customer. AWS handles the commerce, not the relationship.
Listing types determine everything downstream
Your product type is not a label. It decides your fulfillment mechanics, your metering obligations and your fee:
- SaaS — your product runs in your infrastructure. AWS sends the buyer to a registration URL you host, carrying a token you resolve into a customer record.
- Server products (AMI, container, machine learning) — the customer deploys your software into their own AWS account.
- Professional services — consulting, implementation and support sold as a marketplace offer.
- Data products through AWS Data Exchange.
The three pricing models
Nearly every SaaS listing is one of three, and the choice is hard to reverse once customers are on it:
- Subscription — recurring charge, usually monthly, no commitment.
- Contract — a committed term at a fixed price, billed up front or on a schedule. This is where most enterprise money sits.
- Contract with consumption — a committed baseline plus metered overage. The most flexible and the most operationally demanding, because now your usage reporting is load-bearing for revenue.
If you intend to charge by usage at all, the metering obligation is yours. What you fail to report is not billed.
The new listing fees, and the number people get wrong
AWS charges no upfront or monthly fee for listing. You pay a percentage of the transaction, calculated on pre-tax total contract value. AWS announced a simplified and reduced structure that took effect on January 5, 2024.
Public offers, by deployment method:
- SaaS — 3%
- Server, meaning AMI, container and machine learning — 20%
- AWS Data Exchange — 3%
That 20% is not a typo, and it is the single most consequential number in this post. A company casually comparing “the AWS Marketplace fee” against a reseller margin is usually quoting 3% while planning to ship an AMI. If your product deploys into the customer’s account rather than running in yours, your public-offer economics are completely different, and that should inform whether you list it publicly at all.
Private offers are priced by deal size instead:
- Less than $1M total contract value — 3%
- $1M to less than $10M — 2%
- $10M or more — 1.5%
- All renewals — 1.5%
Two things to notice. Private offer rates apply regardless of deployment method, which means a negotiated AMI deal is dramatically cheaper than a public AMI listing. And renewals are 1.5% whatever the size — AWS is deliberately pricing to keep your recurring revenue on the platform.
One uplift stacks on top: channel partner private offers add 0.5%, calculated on the discounted price you give the partner rather than what they charge the customer.
Currency
Public listings are priced in USD only. Private offers support a wider set of currencies. If you sell in Europe and expect to quote in euros on a public listing, you cannot — that is a private-offer motion whether or not you intended it.
Renewals just got easier to book
A useful change landed in January alongside the fee reset. Future dated agreements let you specify a future start date when creating a SaaS private offer. The customer accepts now, and their entitlement begins on the date you set.
That sounds minor and is not. It separates three things that used to be welded together: when the deal is booked, when the invoice is scheduled, and when the customer starts using the product. If you have ever had a renewal slip because you could not paper it until the old term expired, this is the fix.
What listing actually requires of you
The work falls into four buckets, and only the first is what people expect:
- Seller registration — legal entity, tax forms, bank details for disbursement. Allow weeks, not days, if your finance team has not done it before.
- Listing content — description, categories, pricing dimensions, and your end-user licence agreement. This goes through AWS review, and first submissions commonly come back.
- Fulfillment integration — for SaaS, resolving the registration token into a customer in your system and provisioning them. Real engineering work, not configuration.
- Metering and reconciliation — if you charge by usage, reporting it correctly and then matching AWS’s disbursement reports against your own ledger.
The fourth is the one companies underestimate, because it never ends and it is where money quietly leaks.
What you get that is not the transaction
Two things, and they are the actual reason to be there.
Committed spend. Enterprise customers hold AWS commitments — money already allocated that needs spending within a term. Software bought through AWS Marketplace draws down against that commitment. You stop competing for new budget and start competing for budget that exists and has a deadline.
Cloud seller motivation. When a deal transacts through the marketplace, the AWS account team working that customer gets credit toward their quota. That is what turns an AWS seller from a bystander into someone with a reason to introduce you. Nearly everything written about co-sell reduces to this one mechanism.
Where to go next
If you are weighing listing types and pricing models for a specific product, our launch service covers registration through first listing, and the marketplace platform handles the offer, metering and revenue plumbing afterwards.
The honest summary
AWS Marketplace is good at removing procurement friction and reaching committed budget. It is not free, the fee depends on choices you make early, and the integration and reconciliation work is ongoing rather than one-time. Go in knowing which number applies to your deployment model — particularly if that number is 20%.