The Hidden Costs of SaaS Marketplaces: What Vendors and Buyers Need to Know

For the better part of a decade, SaaS marketplaces have promised to revolutionize software procurement. Cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google tout their digital storefronts as game-changers, offering customers convenience and security while promising vendors access to lucrative enterprise clients and simplified billing. The narrative is persuasive: focus on building your product, list it on a trusted platform, and let the marketplace handle the messy business of marketing, compliance, and closing deals. Yet as the digital dust settles, early enthusiasm is giving way to a more nuanced reality. The hidden costs of relying on SaaS marketplaces, financial, operational, and strategic, are becoming increasingly difficult for software companies and buyers to ignore.

Marketplace fees are the most obvious line item, and the one vendors tend to notice first. At face value, the numbers can be striking. AWS, for example, typically charges up to 5 percent of the transaction value for listings in its Marketplace. While that might seem reasonable compared to the 30 percent Apple or Google levy on consumer app stores, SaaS purchases are far larger and more complex. Enterprise agreements often run into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. For vendors operating on thinning margins, a 5 percent fee can be the difference between profitability and a loss.

Yet transaction fees are only the beginning. Savvy vendors quickly discover what those fees actually buy: access, not guaranteed customers. Listing a product is no more a recipe for sales than releasing a new book guarantees bestseller status. SaaS marketplaces are crowded, and differentiation is difficult. In many cases, the most successful listings are those backed by substantial marketing spend, sponsoring placement, buying ads across the platform, and investing heavily in co-sell motions with the hyperscalers’ field sales teams. Just as with search engine advertising, the cost of standing out continues to rise as competition intensifies.

Customer acquisition through marketplaces may be faster, owing to streamlined procurement and familiar contracting processes, but it is rarely cheaper. Vendors report that to generate real traction, they must re-invest heavily in enablement materials, battle-tested technical integrations, and tailored onboarding experiences. The reality of modern enterprise procurement means alignment with complex ecosystem requirements, whether that is supporting private offers, specific contract terms, or integrating with the marketplace’s billing APIs. Each of these steps adds engineering and compliance costs that vendors must absorb, often duplicating effort to meet the slight variations favored by each cloud provider.

For customers, the picture is equally complicated. On paper, buying through a marketplace consolidates invoicing and manages exposure to a single, trusted vendor. In practice, many organizations are surprised by the limitations baked into the model. Marketplace purchases frequently count toward cloud spend commitments, creating an incentive for procurement teams to funnel transactions through these channels. What these teams sometimes miss is a creeping lock-in: switching cloud providers (or even negotiating with vendors outside the marketplace) becomes difficult, as the ease of procurement becomes a subtle tether to a particular ecosystem.

Financially, enterprises must be mindful of how marketplace fees propagate upstream. Providers eager to recoup the lost margin may quietly increase their SaaS pricing on marketplace channels, passing some or all of the fee to customers. Careful comparison shopping sometimes reveals notable differences between direct and marketplace prices, which can undermine the perceived simplicity and cost savings marketplaces claim to offer.

The trend toward embedding purchases in cloud budgets reflects a larger shift in software procurement philosophy, one in which convenience now outweighs cost optimization or vendor neutrality. For IT and procurement leaders, this introduces new dilemmas. On the one hand, consolidating spend can simplify reporting and align with broader cloud transformation strategies. On the other, it may limit access to best-of-breed vendors who choose not to participate in specific marketplaces, whether for margin reasons or to maintain more direct customer relationships.

There are, nonetheless, real opportunities in leveraging SaaS marketplaces strategically. Vendors able to align tightly with a hyperscaler’s platform, not just technically, but commercially, can benefit from the halo effect of vendor co-selling and the credibility associated with well-known digital storefronts. For startups, marketplaces can provide validation and inbound demand that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Large vendors, meanwhile, gain more efficient ways to address customers bound by strict procurement policies or eager to maximize cloud commits.

But there are subtle lessons here. The most successful SaaS vendors do not treat marketplaces as their primary engine for growth. Rather, they see these channels as one part of a diversified go-to-market plan. They remain vigilant about the true costs of marketplace participation, the onboarding and maintenance, the channel conflict, the cost of incentives to field teams, and, above all, the risk of strategic dependency on a single ecosystem.

A savvy vendor also navigates the trade-offs between operational friction and strategic flexibility. For some, the prospect of simplified contracting and shared billing justifies higher direct costs. For others, the loss of intimacy with the end customer, the ability to manage renewals, support, and upsells directly, proves too steep a price to pay for marketplace convenience.

From the buyer’s perspective, due diligence remains as vital as ever, perhaps more so. Procurement teams should look beyond the surface promises of marketplaces and examine the total cost of ownership, the implications of cloud spend alignment, and the risk of marketplace-specific lock-in. In an era when cloud commitments can stretch into the tens or hundreds of millions, a hasty reliance on marketplace procurement may seem expedient but could narrow future options.

SaaS marketplaces, in short, are a powerful development in enterprise software, part trusted advisor, part toll collector. Their fees, both visible and hidden, are reshaping the economics of software as much as their convenience transforms its consumption. As the marketplace model matures, vendors and buyers alike must approach it with open eyes and clear strategies. The costs are real, but so are the opportunities, if you know where, and how, to look.