AWS Marketplace is “a curated digital catalog that you can use to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, data, and services”.[1] The software is licensed by its seller, not by Amazon Web Services: “When the seller submits a product in AWS Marketplace, the seller defines the price of the product, and the terms and conditions of use”, and charges appear on the buyer’s AWS bill, after which AWS Marketplace pays the seller.[1] Buyers purchase at the listed price under the seller’s standard end user license agreement (EULA), under the Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace, or through a private offer with custom pricing and EULA.[1] For software asset management, Marketplace purchases are entitlements to third-party products whose metric, term and renewal behaviour are set by the offer, while the AWS Service Terms add buyer terms that apply to every transaction.[10]
Editions
Products are delivered in several forms, including Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), CloudFormation templates, containers, software as a service (SaaS), machine learning models, data products and professional services.[1][3] Each product may have one or more offers. A public offer is visible to all buyers; a private offer is visible only to the AWS accounts it is extended to.[4] Public listings are priced in US dollars, while private offers support USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, JPY and INR (INR for sellers in India only).[9]
Metrics
Marketplace pricing models, as documented for sellers, are:
| Delivery | Pricing model | How it counts |
|---|---|---|
| AMI | Free | No software charge.[5] |
| AMI | Bring your own license (BYOL) | No Marketplace charge; the license key “is purchased outside of AWS Marketplace” and the seller handles entitlement and enforcement.[5] |
| AMI | Hourly | Per instance type; “usage is rounded up to the nearest whole hour.”[5] |
| AMI | Hourly with annual | A year of usage bought upfront for one instance of one instance type; excess usage at the hourly rate.[5] |
| AMI | Multi-annual and custom duration | Private offers only; up to 12 years, upfront or on a payment schedule.[5] |
| AMI | Monthly | Fixed monthly fee regardless of the number of instances, prorated at sign-up and cancellation.[5] |
| SaaS | Subscription | Pay-as-you-go billing of usage reported by the seller.[7] |
| SaaS | Contract, and contract with pay-as-you-go | Billed in advance or on a flexible payment schedule, optionally with metered usage above the contract.[7] |
The hourly AMI unit is recorded in the catalog as Instance-hour. SaaS contracts can be sold in “discrete quantities of licenses or data ingest”, for example “10 user access licenses for a year”.[14] The actual licensing metric (user, core, gigabyte and so on) is whatever dimension the seller defines.
Counting / floors
An annual AMI subscription is “a one-time upfront payment” with no hourly fee for 12 months, and “one annual subscription” applies “to one Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance.”[6] It covers only the instance types specified at purchase; other instance types incur the hourly rate.[6] Annual agreements can be amended to switch instance family or size, add instance types or increase quantities, with changes co-termed to the existing end date, but only if “the prorated cost of the change is greater than zero”; a switch to a cheaper configuration or a removal is refused.[6] An annual subscription bought in one account of an AWS Organization is shared across the linked account family and can count toward usage in another linked account.[2]
The free trial on hourly AMIs limits the buyer to one free instance for 5 to 30 days, applied to the most expensive running instance type.[5] Private offers cannot cap usage: “the buyer can use as much of your product at the negotiated prices as they want, unless the product has a limit.”[4]
Virtualization & partitioning
Marketplace software charges are separate from infrastructure. “Charges for using Amazon EC2 and other services from AWS are separate and in addition to what you pay to purchase AWS Marketplace software products.”[6] Marketplace products can run on EC2 Reserved Instances and Spot Instances as well as On-Demand Instances.[1] RHEL and SUSE AMIs from AWS Marketplace cannot be used on Dedicated Hosts (except high-memory hosts); see Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts and AWS License Manager.
Cloud / BYOL
BYOL listings let a buyer deploy a seller’s AMI using a license bought directly from the seller, with no Marketplace software charge.[5] However, “Private offers don’t support the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model.”[4] For entitlement tracking, AWS License Manager governs licenses bought from AWS Marketplace as granted licenses, and sellers can issue licenses and track check-outs through it; ISVs selling through Marketplace “benefit from automatic license creation and distribution as a part of the transaction workflow.”[12] For AMI and container products bought under a private offer, the management account can share the license with member accounts through License Manager.[2]
Programs
Private offers
A private offer lets a buyer “receive product pricing and EULA terms from a seller” that “aren’t publicly available”; the seller creates it for the account the buyer designates, and “Each private offer can be made to up to 25 accounts.”[2] Accepting it creates an agreement between buyer and seller; accepting does not require a new deployment, because it changes the price of the existing subscription.[2] Buyers “can only be subscribed to one offer at any given time”, private or public.[4] Private offer durations depend on the product type:[3]
| Product type | Private offer terms |
|---|---|
| SaaS contract | One month, one, two or three years, or custom up to 144 months; upfront or flexible payment schedule; optional pay-as-you-go overage |
| SaaS subscription | Agreed price; billed on seller-reported usage |
| AMI hourly | Negotiated hourly rate, rounded up to the nearest hour |
| AMI hourly with annual | Hourly and long-term prices per instance type; 1 day to 12 years |
| AMI contract | Contract price and duration of 1 to 144 months |
| Machine learning hourly | Custom duration, then reverts to public pricing |
| Professional services | Always private offers |
Installment plans (flexible payment schedules) spread payments over the contract, monthly, quarterly, annually or custom, with up to 86 payments.[13] Once a buyer has subscribed, the payment schedule cannot be modified; a new offer is required.[13] Sellers can add auto-renewal “either at the same price or with a price uplift” to offers using contract pricing, and buyers opt in or out before the renewal deadline.[4] For SaaS contracts, a seller may issue an upgrade or renewal private offer; if accepted, “Any previous terms or remaining scheduled payments are cancelled and replaced by this new agreement’s terms.”[2]
At the end of the agreement, the buyer will “either automatically move to the product’s public pricing or lose your subscription to the product”, depending on product type.[2] New instance types or Regions added by a seller are not automatically available to existing private-offer subscribers.[4] See the rule private offer expiry.
Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace
The Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace (SCMP) is a contract template that “governs usage and defines the obligations of buyers and sellers for digital solutions”, covering use, warranty, indemnification and governing law.[8] Sellers may apply it as the EULA for self-service listings; in private offers, buyers can request it and the parties can amend it. Optional addendums cover enhanced security, HIPAA and U.S. Government purchases.[8] The EULA remains “between you and the buyer”, and AWS may update the SCMP template periodically.[8] The catalog records it as Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace.
Price changes and buyer terms
For existing public-offer subscribers, “price decreases take effect immediately” while “price increases become effective on the first day of the month following a 90-day notification period.”[9] Section 20 of the AWS Service Terms adds buyer terms: the contract term starts on the date in the EULA or order form, or otherwise on the date of the AWS Marketplace invoice; disputes with a seller “must be resolved directly with the third party provider”; AWS may disable access to third-party content for overdue and uncollected payments, where the seller authorizes it, on at least 30 days’ notice; and buyers may not modify or create derivative works of Marketplace content unless its license allows.[10] Under the AWS Customer Agreement, Third-Party Content may carry “separate fees and charges”.[11]
Out of scope
This article does not cover individual sellers’ EULAs or prices, AWS Marketplace seller fees and disbursement, the Reseller Contract for AWS Marketplace from the channel side, AWS Data Exchange subscription terms, or tax treatment of Marketplace invoices.