How Cloud Marketplace Private Offers Work on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud

What is a private offer?

A private offer is a marketplace listing extended to specific, named customers rather than to everyone browsing the catalogue. The product, price, contract length and terms are negotiated for that one buyer, nobody else can see or purchase the offer, and the transaction still runs through the cloud provider's billing system.

That last point is the entire reason private offers exist: the customer pays on their existing cloud bill, under their existing procurement relationship, without onboarding a new vendor.

That billing path is what makes private offers commercially interesting rather than merely convenient. Because the purchase flows through the marketplace, it can draw down against money the customer has already committed to spend with the cloud provider, and because it is a negotiated rather than a listed transaction, several of the clouds charge the seller a materially lower fee on it. Both effects are large, both are published, and they point in the same direction.

The three clouds implement this with different names and very different degrees of transparency. Microsoft calls them private offers and private plans; AWS calls them private offers, with a channel variant; Google Cloud calls them private offers with a choice of pricing models. What follows is the mechanics of each, with the figures each vendor actually publishes — and an explicit note where one of them publishes nothing at all.

How much does a private offer save an AWS seller in fees?

On a $100 contract, an AWS seller keeps $80 from a public server listing and $97 from the same deal sold as a private offer. AWS sets public-offer fees by deployment method — 20 percent for a server listing (AMI, container or machine-learning product) — but private-offer fees by contract value, 3 percent below $1 million.

The saving is on the seller's fee, not the buyer's price: the same product at the same price to the same customer, with 17 more dollars in every hundred reaching the vendor.

Worked on a $100 pre-tax total contract value: sold as a public AMI listing, the seller receives $80. Sold as a private offer, the seller receives $97. That is a seventeen-point swing produced purely by the mechanism of sale, with no change to the product, the customer or the price they pay. For anyone publishing VM images or containers to AWS Marketplace, this is the difference between a listing being a viable revenue channel and a lossy one.

Microsoft publishes its own worked example on exactly the same $100 figure, and the arithmetic is simpler because the rate does not vary by deployment method. A SaaS offer listed at $100.00 per month bills the customer $100.00, pays the publisher $97.00 and leaves Microsoft $3.00 — the 3 percent standard store service fee on transactable offers. A bring-your-own-licence offer carries no store service fee at all, because Microsoft takes nothing on a licence it did not transact. For a usage-based VM billed at $1.00 per hour of licence plus $0.14 per hour of Azure infrastructure, the publisher receives $0.97 per hour and Microsoft retains $0.03 of the licence fee plus the full $0.14 of Azure usage.

Microsoft also discounts the fee itself in one specific case: private offer customer renewals attract a 50 percent reduction on the existing marketplace transaction fee, applied for the full term of the private offer.

What marketplace fee does each cloud charge?

AWS's published fee schedule is calculated on pre-tax total contract value and has been in effect since 5 January 2024. Microsoft's is a flat rate on transactable offers. Google Cloud does not publish a standard marketplace fee rate in its public documentation at all.

How much counts toward your cloud commitment?

Microsoft states that when a customer purchases Azure benefit-eligible offers through the marketplace, 100 percent of the pre-tax purchase amount counts toward their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). AWS and Google Cloud publish no equivalent percentage, which makes this the question that decides most enterprise marketplace purchases.

For an organisation sitting on a large unspent MACC, that turns third-party software into a way to retire commitment rather than an additional line of spend.

The eligibility conditions are strict and worth checking before assuming the benefit applies. The offer must carry the "Azure benefit eligible" designation. The purchase must be made through the marketplace within the Azure portal, on a subscription tied to the organisation's agreement — a credit-card purchase made directly on Microsoft Marketplace does not contribute. Purchases funded by Azure prepayment (formerly monetary commitments) are not eligible. And the licences must be used exclusively in Azure; deploying them on-premises or in a hybrid configuration disqualifies them.

AWS is the asymmetry worth flagging honestly. Marketplace purchases can count toward an Enterprise Discount Program or Private Pricing Agreement commitment, but AWS does not publish a drawdown percentage in its documentation. A specific figure circulates widely in third-party marketing material; it does not appear in AWS's own docs, so the accurate position is that eligibility and proportion vary by product and agreement, and should be confirmed with the AWS account team rather than assumed from a number found online.

Google Cloud confirms that marketplace purchases draw down Google Cloud commitments, and adds a useful mechanical detail: multi-year private offers paid up to five years in advance draw down on an annual amortised basis rather than all at once. It does not publish a drawdown percentage either.

How do channel partners sell a private offer?

Both Microsoft and AWS support selling a private offer through a channel partner, and both do it by letting the partner set their own margin on top of a wholesale price the software vendor controls. The customer sees one price and one agreement.

On Microsoft, a multiparty private offer is created by the ISV and extended to a channel partner, who adds their margin before sending it to the customer. Exactly one channel partner can be involved per offer. The margin is confidential and internal: Microsoft documents that it does not affect customer pricing, deal terms or disclosures, and the publisher agreement refers to the partner's payout as the "Publisher Markup" — the difference between the ISV's price and the partner's price. The partner must be enrolled in Microsoft Marketplace with a completed tax profile in an eligible country, and US tax profiles must file resale certificates.

On AWS the equivalent is a Channel Partner Private Offer. The ISV and partner first establish a selling authorization, which may be recurring (reusable, running either until a set date or indefinitely) or non-recurring (one-time, for a single buyer). The partner starts from an ISV-set wholesale cost and marks it up. AWS adds a 0.5 percent uplift to the listing fee for a CPPO regardless of offer type or deployment method — so a SaaS private offer under $1 million becomes 3.5 percent rather than 3 percent — and, importantly, that fee is calculated on the discounted price the ISV offered the channel partner and is deducted from the ISV's disbursement, not the partner's. The partner must be a registered paid seller with the required service-linked role.

Google Cloud's public documentation does not describe an equivalent multiparty mechanism in the same detail, so no comparable figures are given here.

How long can a private offer run, and what happens when it expires?

Contract length, acceptance windows and what happens at expiry are where the three clouds diverge most, and where deals most often go wrong operationally.

Which marketplace figures does each cloud actually publish?

Microsoft publishes both its fee rate and its commitment drawdown percentage, with worked examples. AWS publishes its fee schedule exhaustively but no commitment drawdown percentage. Google Cloud publishes neither a standard fee rate nor a drawdown percentage in its public documentation. Comparing the three fairly means stating that asymmetry, because no vendor has an incentive to point it out.

AWS's schedule runs by deployment method, by contract-value tier and by renewal status, with a named regional uplift for South Korea of one percentage point effective 1 April 2025. Google does document its pricing models and commitment mechanics in detail — it is the rates that are missing.

That matters practically. On Microsoft and AWS a seller can model net revenue precisely before negotiating. On Google Cloud the fee has to be confirmed through the partner relationship rather than read off a page. Anyone publishing a figure for Google's marketplace rate or drawdown percentage — including the widely-repeated numbers that circulate in vendor blog posts — is citing something other than Google's own documentation, which is worth knowing before building a financial model on it.

One structural detail on Google worth knowing regardless: VM and Kubernetes products must use usage-based pricing, with discounts restricted to vCPU, GPU and RAM metrics, while SaaS products can use flat fee, usage-based or flat-fee-with-usage models. Google's own committed-use example is instructive — against a $100 monthly commitment, $160 of list-price usage totals $135 when the overage is charged at list, or $120 when all usage is discounted.

When should a software vendor use a private offer instead of a public listing?

Whenever a real sales conversation exists. On AWS the fee asymmetry alone settles it: a server product sold through the public listing pays 20 percent on every transaction, while the same customer routed through a private offer pays 3 percent, and the gap widens as contract values climb into the lower-fee tiers.

The public listing still earns its place as a discovery and credibility surface — buyers find products there, and procurement teams trust a marketplace-listed vendor — but the transaction itself belongs in a private offer.

The buyer-side argument is separate and often stronger: a purchase that retires committed cloud spend is easier to approve than one that adds new spend, which is why the Azure benefit-eligible designation and its 100 percent MACC drawdown are worth engineering a listing around rather than treating as a formality.