Pricing Models
The following topics provide general information about the pricing models available in AWS Marketplace.
Topics
- Annual pricing
- Usage pricing
- Contract pricing
- Bring Your Own License pricing
- For information about the pricing models for specific product delivery methods, see:
Annual pricing
An annual pricing model enables you to offer products to customers who can purchase a 12-month subscription. The subscription pricing can provide up to 40 percent savings compared to running the same product hourly for extended periods. The customer is invoiced for the full amount of the contract at the time of subscription. For more information about how annual subscriptions are presented to customers, see AMI Subscriptions.
Considerations when working with an annual subscription include the following:
Annual pricing is defined per instance type. It can be the same for all Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types or different for each instance type.
All Annual instance types must also have an Hourly instance type defined. AWS Marketplace doesn't offer Annual-only pricing or Hourly without Annual on the same product. For any product offering Annual pricing, Hourly pricing also needs to be specified.
A $0 Annual price is allowed on a specific instance type, if the Hourly price is also $0 and there are other non-$0 Annual instance types defined.
At the end of the annual subscription period, the customer will start being charged at the hourly price.
If a customer buys X Annual subscriptions but is running Y software on Y instances, then the customer is charged at Hourly software price for (Y-X) instances which are not covered by Annual subscriptions. As such, an Hourly rate must be included for all Annual pricing instance types.
Using seller private offers, you can offer a multi-year (up to 3 years) or custom duration AMI with upfront payment, or a flexible payment schedule. For more information about multi-year and custom duration contracts, see Private offers and Flexible payment scheduler.
If you offer an Annual product in AWS Marketplace, you agree to the specific refund policies for Annual products, located in the File Uploader documents section in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.
Price change
You can change annual prices (the $ value, for example $1,000/year to $1,200/year) whenever you want. However, you must give 90 days' notice to existing customers of annual pricing. The new price will apply to new subscriptions but will have no impact on existing subscriptions.
Price changes will be effective for auto-renewals only if the price was changed at least 90 days before the auto-renewal date. The customer will receive an email message prior to auto-renewal that includes the new price.
End user license agreement
An AWS customer’s usage of software for 12 months under an annual subscription is covered by the EULA that you provide on your product’s details page on AWS Marketplace.
Usage pricing
A usage pricing model, also known as pay as you go pricing, enables you to offer products to customers who only pay for what they use.
As a seller, you can choose one of the following usage categories:
- Users
- Hosts
- Bandwidth
- Data
- Tiers
You can also define up to 24 dimensions for the product. Charges are measured and reported when the API is called by the software. We recommend that sellers configure the API to be called once per hour as a best practice, depending on their use case. All usage is calculated monthly and billed monthly using the same mechanism as existing AWS Marketplace software.
Using the AWS Marketplace Metering Service, you can handle several new pricing scenarios.
Example Charge by Host
If your software monitors hosts, you can charge for each host monitored and set different pricing based on the host size.
Notes
In the Product Load Form (PLF), relevant columns are preceded with "FCP" (Flexible Consumption Pricing). For example: FCP Category (Custom Pricing Category).
For AWS Marketplace Metering Service products, note the following:
If your software is already on AWS Marketplace, you will need to create a product to enable an alternate usage dimension. You can't convert a standard product to use the AWS Marketplace Metering Service. After the new product is published, you can remove the old product or keep both on the website.
The AWS Marketplace Metering Service requires that your software reports usage every hour, recording the customer usage for the hour. If there is a failure in the transmission or receipt of metering service records, AWS will be unable to bill for such usage. You are responsible for ensuring the successful receipt of metering records.
Contract pricing
Using the contract pricing model, you can offer upfront pricing to customers that enables them to buy a license for 1 month, 12 months, 24 months, or 36 months.
Contract pricing is available for the following products:
Single AMI-based products and AMI with AWS CloudFormation template-based products. For more information, see Contract pricing for AMI products
Container-based products. For more information, see Contract pricing for container products.
Software as a service (SaaS)-based products. For more information, see Pricing for SaaS contracts.