SaaS product guidelines

AWS Marketplace maintains these guidelines for all SaaS products and offerings on AWS Marketplace to promote a safe, secure, and trustworthy platform for our customers.

All products and their related metadata are reviewed when submitted to ensure that they meet or exceed current AWS Marketplace guidelines. These guidelines are reviewed and adjusted to meet our evolving security requirements. In addition, AWS Marketplace continuously reviews products to verify that they meet any changes to these guidelines. If products fall out of compliance, we might require that you update your product and in some cases your product might temporarily be unavailable to new subscribers until issues are resolved.

Product setup guidelines

All SaaS products must adhere to the following product setup guidelines:

• At least one pricing dimension must have a price greater than $0.00.

• All pricing dimensions must relate to actual software and cannot include any other products or services unrelated to the software.

• SaaS products offered exclusively in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions must include GovCloud somewhere in the product title.

Customer information requirements

All SaaS products must adhere to the following customer information requirements:

• SaaS products must be billed entirely through the listed dimensions on AWS Marketplace.

• You cannot collect customer payment information for your SaaS product at any time, including credit card and bank account information.

Product usage guidelines

All SaaS products must adhere to the following product usage guidelines:

• After subscribing to the product in AWS Marketplace, customers should be able to create an account within your SaaS application and gain access to a web console. If the customer cannot gain access to the application immediately, you must provide a message with specific instructions on when they will gain access. When an account has been created, the customer must be sent a notification confirming that their account has been created along with clear next steps.

• If a customer already has an account in the SaaS application, they must have the ability to log in from the fulfillment landing page.

• Customers must be able to see the status of their subscription within the SaaS application, including any relevant contract or subscription usage information.

• Customers must be able to easily get help with issues such as: using the application, troubleshooting, and requesting refunds (if applicable). Support contact options must be specified on the fulfillment landing page.

• Product software and metadata must not contain language that redirects users to other cloud platforms, additional products, upsell services, or free trial offers that aren't available on AWS Marketplace.

  For information about free trials for SaaS products, see SaaS free trials.

• If your product is an add-on to another product or another ISV’s product, your product description must indicate that it extends the functionality of the other product and that without it, your product has very limited utility. For example, This product extends the functionality of <product name> and without it, this product has very limited utility. Please note that <product name> might require its own license for full functionality with this listing.

Architecture guidelines

All SaaS products must adhere to the following architecture guidelines:

• A portion of your application must be hosted in an AWS account that you own.

• All application components should be hosted in infrastructure you manage. Applications that require additional resources in the customer’s infrastructure must follow these guidelines:

  • Provision resources in a secure way, such as using the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

  • Provide additional documentation including a description of all provisioned AWS services, IAM policy statements, and how an IAM role or user is deployed and used in the customer’s account.

  • Include a notification in the product description that explains that if the customer incurs additional AWS infrastructure charges separate from their AWS Marketplace transaction, they're responsible for paying the additional infrastructure charges.

  • If your product deploys an agent, you must provide instructions to the customer that describe how to deploy it in their AWS account.

  • Applications that require resources running in the customer's infrastructure will have an additional review by AWS Marketplace, which can take 2-4 weeks.

• Successfully call the AWS Marketplace APIs from the AWS account that registered as a provider and submitted the SaaS publishing request. The SaaS pricing model determines which APIs should be called:

  • SaaS contracts – GetEntitlements in the AWS Marketplace Entitlement Service.

  • SaaS contracts with consumption – GetEntitlements in the AWS Marketplace Entitlement Service and BatchMeterUsage in the AWS Marketplace Metering Service.

  • SaaS subscriptions – BatchMeterUsage in the AWS Marketplace Metering Service.

• SaaS products offered exclusively in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions must outline the architectural boundaries between other AWS Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, use cases for the product, and the workloads not recommended for the product.