How to create a free trial offer for SaaS contract products in AWS Marketplace

Before making a software purchase decision, many organizations want to evaluate software features and capabilities to determine if the software meets their needs. Free trials for SaaS contracts, now available in AWS Marketplace, enable software vendors to show the value of their products to potential customers. If you are a software vendor looking to offer a trial of your SaaS product to AWS customers, you can create a free trial offer in just a few minutes. A free trial can be a powerful tool in your marketing strategy; it can enable you to generate leads and achieve higher conversion rates.

In this blog post, I will show you how to create a free trial offer for your SaaS contract product listed in AWS Marketplace.

Prerequisites

To offer a free trial for your SaaS contract product in AWS Marketplace, you must complete the following prerequisites:

• You must have access to the AWS Marketplace console.
• You must be fully registered with AWS Marketplace as a seller. For details on how to register, refer to the Checklist to successfully registering as a seller in AWS Marketplace blog post.
• You must have a publicly listed SaaS contract or SaaS contract with pay-as-you-go product listed in AWS Marketplace. Learn more about SaaS product pricing types in AWS Marketplace Seller Guide.
• You must subscribe to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for SaaS products.

Solution walkthrough: How to create a free trial offer for SaaS contract products in AWS Marketplace

Step 1: Create a free trial offer in AWS Marketplace Management Portal

1. Log in to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.
2. In AWS Marketplace Management Portal, under the More Actions panel, choose Create. Alternatively, in the top banner, select the Offers tab.
3. Select the Public free trials tab and then choose Create free trial offer.
4. On the Offer fundamentals screen, select a product for which you want to offer a free trial, and then choose Next. Free trials are currently available only for SaaS contracts and SaaS contracts with pay-as-you-go pricing types.
5. On the Offer metadata screen, do the following:

• • Enter the free trial duration in days. You can select any duration from 7 to 90 days.
  • Configure dimensions and number of units per each dimension that you want to offer as a free trial. You can select one or multiple dimensions from the existing public offer.
  • Select standard AWS Marketplace terms or upload a custom End User License Agreement (EULA).
  • Choose Review offer.

The following screenshot shows the Offer metadata page for the product AWS Marketplace SaaS free trial test product. It lists the buyer as General Public and the offer name of AWS Marketplace SaaS free trial test product free trial. The free trial length is 1 day, the Admin users, Read-only users, and Free trial user dimensions are set to one unit each, and Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace is selected for the EULA.

6. On the Review offer page, review the offer and choose Create offer. You should see a confirmation message, stating that the offer has been created. Wait for a few minutes to see changes in AWS Marketplace product detail page for the selected product.

Step 2: Review your free trial offer in AWS Marketplace

1. To review your free trial offer, log in to AWS Marketplace and navigate to your product’s detail page. In the upper left under the product title, you should see a green Free trial badge. In the upper right, you should see a green Try for free button.

The following screenshot shows my AWS Marketplace SaaS Free Trail Test Product’s product detail page with the Free trial badge and button called out.

2. To view the procurement page, in the upper right, choose the Try for free button.
3. To verify the free trial offer details, review the procurement page.

The following screenshot shows the procurement page for my AWS Marketplace SaaS Free Trial Test Product, including the free trial link, the dimensions I chose in step 1.5, the purchase price of $0, and an orange Create Contract button.

Step 3: Access SaaS Free Trials daily reports

To get automated daily SaaS free trial reports into your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, you must configure access to AWS Marketplace data feeds. Data feeds are delivered daily at 00:00 UTC following an update from the prior day and contain 24 hours of data from the previous day.

The Agreement Details report is a new supplemental report that helps you understand the SaaS contract free trial agreements. The report includes agreement details such as – is_free_trial_offer, subscriber name and id, offer_id, and agreement start and end date. You will receive this report automatically as soon as you get free trial subscribers. To access a daily report, do the following:

1. In the AWS Management Console, navigate to the Amazon S3 bucket you used when onboarding to the data feeds feature. Locate the AgreementDetailsReport_v1 folder.
2. Open the AgreementDetailsReport_V1 folder. To find the free trials report for a particular day, open the corresponding year and month folders.
3. Inside the selected year’s folder, select the desired month.
4. Inside the selected month’s folder, you will find the daily reports, one for each day. To view agreement details, select and download the daily report.

Step 4: Identify free trial customers (Optional)

If you want to provide a custom, account-provisioning workflow to prospects signing up for free trials, including a custom landing page experience, identify the offer type through SNS notification and HTTP POST parameter. To do that, choose one of the following options:

Option 1

Whenever a customer subscribes to your product in AWS Marketplace, you receive an Amazon SNS notification with a successful subscription message. For a free trial offer, isFreeTrialTermPresent flag will be set true in aws-mp-subscription-notification.

{
“action”: “<action-name>”,
“customer-identifier”: “X01EXAMPLEX”,
“product-code”: “n0123EXAMPLEXXXXXXXXXXXX”,
“offer-identifier”: “offer-abcexample123”,
“isFreeTrialTermPresent”: “true”
}

Option 2

After a customer creates the contract, they are redirected to your registration URL, which is an HTTP POST request with a temporary x-amzn-marketplace-token parameter. If the contract is a free trial, a second parameter x-amzn-marketplace-offer-type with the value free-trial will be added to the request. You can use the token to validate the customer and show a custom landing page.

Conclusion

In this post, I demonstrated how to create a free trial offer for your SaaS contract product in AWS Marketplace. In a free trial offer, you can define the duration of the trial and limit how much customers can consume during the trial period. With SNS notifications and HTTP Post flag, you can identify free trial customers and provide a tailored landing page experience. You can track free trial customers and nurture them into paying customers through the supplemental agreement details report.

If you are a registered seller and have questions about this feature, please contact the AWS Marketplace team by filling out the Contact Us form in your seller portal.

About the author

Kunjal Botadra Kunjal is Sr. Product Manager, Technical in AWS Marketplace focusing on SaaS products. Outside of work, he enjoys playing a game of chess and solving Sudoku.