The Complete Guide to Selling on AWS Marketplace.

What is AWS Marketplace?

AWS Marketplace is an online storefront where AWS customers discover, buy, and deploy third-party software, data products, and professional services. It is the largest cloud software marketplace — with more than 3 million active subscriptions, it processes the majority of ISV revenue flowing through cloud marketplaces today.

For ISVs, AWS Marketplace is a billing channel, a distribution channel, and a co-sell channel in one. Buyers transact using their existing AWS account, which means marketplace purchases count against their committed AWS spend (EDP, PPA). Sellers get access to millions of AWS customers and a direct co-sell relationship with AWS field teams.

Why sell on AWS Marketplace

Three dynamics make AWS Marketplace disproportionately valuable:

Buyer budget is pre-committed. Enterprise AWS customers sign Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) or Private Pricing Agreement (PPA) commitments — they promise to spend $X on AWS over N years in exchange for discounted pricing. Every dollar they spend on your software through AWS Marketplace burns down that commitment. Buyers have a direct financial incentive to procure through the marketplace.

AWS sales reps are incentivized to help. AWS field reps carry quota tied to customer AWS consumption. Marketplace purchases count toward that quota, which means AWS reps will actively co-sell your product to accounts where it solves a real problem.

Procurement is standardized. AWS Marketplace uses pre-negotiated terms (EULA or Seller Terms). Most enterprise buyers have already accepted these once — subsequent purchases skip 4-8 weeks of legal and procurement review.

Listing types on AWS Marketplace

AWS supports five listing types. The right choice depends on how your product is delivered.

Most modern ISVs list as SaaS. Suger automates SaaS listing creation across AWS, Azure, and GCP from a single dashboard.

AWS ISV Accelerate — the tier that matters

ISV Accelerate is AWS's top-tier partner program for software vendors that transact through AWS Marketplace. It unlocks three meaningful benefits:

• Reduced marketplace fees on qualifying co-sold deals (down from 3% to as low as 1.5%).
• Direct access to AWS sellers, including enrollment in AWS's internal seller systems and shared pipeline reviews.
• Higher co-sell priority — deals from ISV Accelerate members get surfaced to AWS reps ahead of non-members.

Eligibility requires revenue thresholds (typically $500K+ in AWS Marketplace ARR), an active marketplace listing, validated co-sell engagement history, and AWS Partner Network membership at the Advanced tier or higher. Most ISVs pursue ISV Accelerate after 6-12 months of active marketplace selling.

ACE — how AWS co-sell actually works

ACE (APN Customer Engagements) is AWS's co-sell system. It's how you register opportunities, share deal context, and collaborate with AWS sellers on active pipeline.

The operational loop:

1. Register an opportunity in ACE with customer details, deal size, timeline, and stage.
2. AWS validates the opportunity — they confirm it's a real account, check their own account ownership, and mark it as approved.
3. Engage the AWS rep assigned to that account. Share a "better together" narrative, offer technical resources, and coordinate on procurement.
4. Close the deal through AWS Marketplace, typically via a private offer. The AWS rep gets credit toward their quota.

Teams that treat ACE registration as a sales discipline — registering every qualified opportunity, responding to AWS-surfaced leads within 24 hours, sharing win-wires after closed deals — generate 30-50% of their marketplace pipeline through co-sell. Suger syncs ACE with Salesforce and HubSpot so reps register opportunities from the CRM.

Private offers on AWS — the enterprise deal engine

The vast majority of enterprise revenue on AWS Marketplace flows through private offers — custom-priced agreements sent to a specific AWS account.

A private offer contains:

• Negotiated pricing (flat rate, usage-based, or hybrid)
• Custom contract duration (1, 2, 3+ years)
• Payment schedule (annual upfront, quarterly, monthly)
• Optional discounts for multi-year or multi-product commitments
• Custom EULA terms where standard terms need modification

The buyer receives the offer in their AWS Marketplace console and accepts with a click. Speed matters: when reps manually log into AWS Marketplace to build each offer, deals slow by days. Suger automates the full offer workflow — offers are created from CRM data, approvals route automatically, and the buyer gets the offer in minutes.

Metering and billing on AWS Marketplace

For usage-based products, AWS requires you to report consumption through the AWS Marketplace Metering Service (MMS). Every hour, your product sends usage records (dimensions like API calls, data processed, active users) to MMS, and AWS bills the customer accordingly.

Three things commonly go wrong:

• Missed usage. If metering fails, AWS bills zero — and you eat the revenue loss. MMS has retries, but your metering pipeline needs monitoring.
• Reconciliation drift. AWS's disbursement report shows what AWS billed, which must match what your metering reported. Discrepancies accumulate fast across thousands of transactions.
• Disbursement timing. AWS disburses ~50 days after the customer's billing cycle closes. Finance needs to model this into revenue recognition and cash forecasts.

Suger's metering integration reports usage to MMS automatically, reconciles disbursements against expected revenue, and pushes clean data to finance systems.

The Foundational Technical Review

The FTR is AWS's security and operational best-practices audit. It's required for AMI and Container-based listings; SaaS listings are exempt.

The review covers five pillars:

• Operational excellence — monitoring, logging, runbooks
• Security — IAM, encryption, network controls
• Reliability — fault tolerance, recovery
• Performance efficiency — right-sizing, scaling
• Cost optimization — resource tagging, cost tracking

Most FTRs take 1-2 weeks end-to-end. Failing the FTR means remediation and resubmission, which can delay a launch by a month. Prepare by running the AWS Well-Architected self-assessment before submission.

AWS Marketplace transaction fees

AWS charges a percentage of each transaction as the marketplace fee. The base rate is 3% for most private offers and SaaS subscriptions. Some category and deal types carry up to 5%.

Reductions are available through:

• ISV Accelerate membership — fees drop to 1.5% on qualifying co-sold deals.
• Deal volume thresholds — certain enterprise deals over $1M negotiate custom fee structures directly with AWS.

Most teams absorb the fee into margin rather than passing it to the buyer. Keeping marketplace pricing identical to direct pricing removes friction and makes the buyer's choice easy.

Common mistakes on AWS Marketplace

1. Launching SaaS without metering rigor

If your usage metering pipeline isn't instrumented for monitoring and retries, you'll silently lose revenue. Set alerts on metering submission failures from day one.

2. Ignoring ACE registration discipline

Reps default to "I'll register it later" — they never do. The opportunity closes through direct sales, AWS doesn't get credit, and next quarter AWS deprioritizes you. Register every qualified opportunity as a sales rule.

3. Treating ISV Accelerate as optional

Non-ISV-Accelerate ISVs leave meaningful fee reduction and co-sell priority on the table. Once you cross $500K ARR on AWS Marketplace, pursue the tier.

4. Manually building every private offer

At 10+ private offers per month, manual creation becomes a bottleneck. Offers expire. Approvals stall. Use a Cloud GTM platform or build the workflow into your CRM.

5. Skipping reconciliation until Q4

AWS disbursement reports include fees, refunds, and timing adjustments. If finance only reconciles annually, year-end close becomes a nightmare. Reconcile monthly.

Frequently asked questions