New Feature Simplifies SaaS Procurement in AWS Marketplace

By KC Li, Sr. Product Manager Technical at AWS

Over the last two years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched SaaS Subscriptions and SaaS Contracts for AWS Marketplace, two procurement capabilities that enable you to offer SaaS solutions directly to AWS Customers.

We’re excited to announce an enhancement to SaaS Contracts that allows your customers to pay-as-they-go if they need additional services above the original contract. Customers can now combine the discounts from committed usage and the flexibility of pay-as-you-go pricing.

Learn more about SaaS on AWS Marketplace >>

How it Works

With this new feature, customers will select your SaaS product in AWS Marketplace and configure the amount of usage and duration they want for their contract. If additional usage is needed, they will be charged at the rate you’ve set, ensuring they only pay for what they use without over-committing on their up-front contract or having premature upgrade discussions.

Now, it’s easier to meet the needs of customers who want more flexibility on additional usage. This can include seasonal businesses, startups that are rapidly scaling, and enterprises migrating to the AWS Cloud at an accelerating pace.

By offering a pricing model that better meets customers’ needs, you can help them simplify purchase decisions and, as a result, reduce the time required to close a sale. For opportunities with larger contract values, you can create Seller Private Offers with custom contract and pay-as-you-go prices.

Take a look at some examples of Sellers that have taken advantage of this new capability.

Getting Started

Once you have established your AWS Marketplace Seller account, go to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal and create a new SaaS Contracts product in the listing tab.

Figure 1 – Create a new SaaS Contracts product in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.

In the pricing section, you will define pricing dimensions that represent your software features or services. Examples of dimensions are users, hosts scanned, GBs of logs ingested, or an enterprise tier of your software.

For each dimension you define, add a name, description, and contract prices that are displayed to customers. You will also define an API name to identify the dimension when calling our APIs. You can add pay-as-you-go pricing for additional usage above a customer’s contract.

Figure 2 – Define contract and additional usage prices for each dimension.

You can also add additional pricing dimensions that customers only consume by paying as they go. For example, you can have a pricing model where customers purchase a base tier (e.g. pro edition) and then pay as they go for each individual service (e.g. per image processed).

Figure 3 – Add pricing dimensions that customers only consume by paying as they go.

When you’re finished defining your listing, submit it to AWS Marketplace to make it available to customers.

After creating a new contract, your customers will be directed to your registration page with a URL containing a token for user provisioning and account setup. This is identical to the process for existing SaaS products in AWS Marketplace.

You will need to modify your registration page to receive a token containing the customer identifier and product code, and then integrate your product with existing Entitlement and Metering APIs in AWS Marketplace.

You’ll use the Entitlement API to check customers’ contract entitlement and duration, and the Metering API to send metering records to bill for additional usage.

You can download the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) to help you format your API calls in any of the AWS-supported languages. More details on this step can be found in the documentation.

As a final step, you’ll receive notifications through Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) when your customers purchase, upgrade, or renew their contracts for your SaaS product.

Additional Resources

To learn more about selling your product as a SaaS solution on AWS Marketplace, or to modify your product to become a SaaS solution, visit the AWS Marketplace SaaS Seller Integration Guide.