If you sell software through the cloud, Microsoft Marketplace is probably already on your roadmap, or already causing you some quiet confusion about what changed and when.
This guide walks through what Microsoft Marketplace actually is today, what it takes to list and get paid, how co-sell and MACC actually work underneath the jargon, and where most ISVs leave revenue on the table without realizing it.
Let’s get started.
What Is Microsoft Marketplace? (And What Happened To Azure Marketplace And AppSource?)
On September 25, 2025, Microsoft folded Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource into one single storefront called Microsoft Marketplace.
Azure Marketplace used to be the aisle for infrastructure and developer tools. AppSource was the aisle for business apps and productivity add-ons. If your product only lived in one aisle, that was simple enough. If it lived in both, you were juggling two listings, two processes, and sometimes even two different people managing them internally. Now it’s just one aisle, one listing flow inside Partner Center, and one catalog where technical buyers and business users browse the same place instead of two separate storefronts.
Here’s what actually matters for you as a seller: if your website, your sales deck, or your pitch still says “Azure Marketplace” as though it’s separate from AppSource, it’s time to update it. Nothing about how you list, price, or get paid has changed.
If you’re also weighing Microsoft against AWS or Google Cloud, here’s a guide on that: AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP Marketplace.
Why Sell On Microsoft Marketplace
The pitch for listing on any hyperscaler marketplace is roughly the same everywhere: reach, procurement speed, and credibility. However, Microsoft Marketplace has a specific, sharper version of all three.
Reach into an installed base that’s already there. You’re not generating new demand so much as meeting existing Microsoft customers where they already do their cloud purchasing. That’s a fundamentally different motion than outbound sales, and it compounds with Microsoft’s own partner and reseller network rather than competing with it.
MACC drawdown is the single biggest lever in this entire ecosystem, and it’s worth understanding properly rather than as a buzzword. A Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) is pre-committed cloud spend an enterprise customer has already budgeted and gotten internal approval for. When your offer is Azure benefit-eligible and the customer buys it through the Azure portal during their active MACC term, 100% of that pretax purchase amount counts against the commitment they’ve already made. In other words, the customer isn’t asking finance for new budget. They’re just spending money that’s already been approved. That’s why marketplace deals move faster through procurement than a typical net-new vendor relationship, and it’s a thread that runs through pricing, private offers, and co-sell, all of which loop back to this same mechanic later in this guide.
Shorter sales cycles and simpler procurement, beyond just MACC. Marketplace purchases route through infrastructure Microsoft customers already have contracts and approval processes for, which strips out a meaningful chunk of the vendor security review and legal back-and-forth that comes with bringing on a brand-new vendor from scratch.
Access to Microsoft’s own field sales, through co-sell. Once you’re past initial listing, co-sell status opens the door to joint selling alongside Microsoft account teams.
Canalys projects enterprise software sales through hyperscaler cloud marketplaces will reach $85 billion by 2028, up from $16 billion in 2023, a more than fivefold increase in five years. Separately, Partner Insight’s analysis of Q2 2025 hyperscaler earnings put total cloud spend commitments at a record $469 billion for that quarter, with an estimated $165 billion of that tied to Microsoft specifically. This market is getting bigger every quarter, and Microsoft’s share of it is not small.
What You Need Before You List On Microsoft Marketplace
Before you touch Partner Center, work through this checklist. Almost every delay in a first listing traces back to one of these being incomplete when the offer goes in for validation.
✅ Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program membership. This is the umbrella partner program, what used to be called the Microsoft Partner Network. It gives you a PartnerID, and you’ll need that ID for every subsequent step, including co-sell.
✅ A complete business profile in Partner Center. Legal entity information, tax profile, and payout details. All of it needs to be filled in before Microsoft will let an offer go live, not after you’ve already tried to publish and hit a wall.
✅ Technical readiness that matches your listing type. What “ready” actually means depends heavily on whether you’re publishing a SaaS app, a VM image, a container, or a managed application. The next section breaks each of those down specifically, because treating them as interchangeable is where a lot of first-time sellers lose time.
✅ A named sales contact for every geography you plan to sell into. This is technically a co-sell requirement rather than a listing one, but it’s worth setting up at the same time as everything else above, instead of scrambling for it later when a co-sell opportunity is already sitting in front of you.
Tick off all of these before you submit anything for validation. It’s the least glamorous part of the whole process, and also the part most worth getting right before you try to move fast on anything else.
Microsoft Marketplace Listing Types: SaaS, VM, Container, And Managed App
Microsoft Marketplace supports several distinct offer types, and picking the right one shapes your billing model, your technical requirements, and your path to MACC eligibility. Here’s how they break down:
| Listing type | What it’s for | Typical billing | MACC eligible |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS | Hosted software you provision and meter yourself | Subscription, per-user, or metered/usage-based | Yes |
| Virtual machine (VM) | Packaged VM images, infrastructure software, security appliances | Per hour or per unit of usage | Yes |
| Container | Container-based products spanning security, AI infrastructure, developer tooling | Usage-based or per-container pricing | Yes |
| Managed application | Pre-configured, deployable Azure resource bundles the customer deploys into their own subscription | Often flat-rate or subscription | Yes |
| Consulting service | Professional services listings | Fixed-fee or scoped engagement | No |
SaaS is the default entry point for most software companies, and for good reason. You handle provisioning and metering through your own application, Microsoft handles billing and marketplace discovery, and it supports subscription, per-user, and metered pricing without much friction.
Container listings deserve more attention than most guides give them. Container adoption on Microsoft Marketplace has been growing fast, security tooling, AI infrastructure, developer tooling, all increasingly shipping as containers rather than traditional SaaS. Until recently, ISVs selling both SaaS and container products had to manage them through genuinely separate workflows, one for SaaS through a unified platform, and a completely different one for containers directly inside Partner Center. You end up with listings that fall out of sync, private offers that get handled differently depending on who’s doing it, and two teams doing a job that should honestly just be one team’s. Labra now supports container listings and container private offers alongside SaaS in a single platform, which is what closed that specific gap. If your product portfolio spans SaaS and container products, plan for both from day one. Treating containers as an afterthought is how that operational split happens in the first place.
Virtual machine and managed application listings are the right call when your product genuinely needs to run as a full machine image or a packaged set of Azure resources rather than a hosted service you control end to end. Don’t force a VM-shaped product into a SaaS listing just because SaaS is the easier path to set up. It’ll cost you more in rework later than it saves you now.
For most ISVs, start with SaaS. But plan the listing type around what you’re actually shipping, not around whichever one is fastest to configure this quarter.
How To List On Microsoft Marketplace: Step By Step
The mechanics of getting a first offer live look like this:
- Enroll in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program and get your PartnerID, if you haven’t already.
- Create your offer in Partner Center, choosing the listing type that actually matches your product.
- Configure your technical details and pricing plans. This differs meaningfully by listing type: a SaaS offer needs your metering and provisioning APIs wired up correctly, a VM offer needs your image validated against Microsoft’s requirements, and so on.
- Complete compliance and Microsoft’s validation process. This covers legal, tax, and technical validation, and it’s the step most likely to introduce delay, almost always because the business profile from the prerequisites section above wasn’t fully filled out going in.
- Publish and go live. Once validation clears, your offer is discoverable, and if it’s configured as transactable, purchasable directly on Microsoft Marketplace.
- Manage the offer on an ongoing basis. Listing isn’t a one-time task you check off. Pricing updates, new plans, private offers, and co-sell activity all happen against a live offer, which is exactly why treating Partner Center as a “set it and forget it” step is one of the more common and more costly mistakes, covered in full later in this guide.
P.S. you’ll see some guides throw out a number here, “5 to 10 business days,” “14 days flat.” However, how fast you actually get through this comes down almost entirely to how complete your business profile and technical validation are before you hit submit, which is exactly why that checklist earlier isn’t something to skim past.
Microsoft Marketplace Fees, Pricing Models, And Payment Terms
The transaction fee is 3%. Microsoft charges a 3% standard store service fee on customer purchases of transactable offers on Microsoft Marketplace. There’s no cost to publish an offer in the first place, and payouts are issued once your combined sales reach a minimum of $50.
Pricing models available to you:
- Pay-as-you-go and usage-based (metered billing)
- Flat-rate subscription
- Per-user pricing
- Bring-your-own-license (BYOL), for customers who already hold a license outside the marketplace
Metered billing has a specific mechanic worth knowing before you build for it, not after. If you’re running usage-based pricing, Microsoft’s metering API operates on a rolling 24-hour reporting window. Usage has to be submitted inside that window to bill correctly. Easy to miss while you’re still building the integration, and a pain to find out about once it’s already live.
Payment terms are where most guides stop, and where there’s actually more room to work with than people assume. With Labra, you can actually set flexible net payment terms on Microsoft Marketplace, anywhere from Net 15 to Net 120, and set it per offer instead of being locked into one term across the board. That works across private offers, resale authorizations, and channel partner private offers too, which comes in handy the moment an enterprise buyer’s finance team pushes back with their own payment cadence. Most sellers don’t even realize this kind of flexibility is on the table.
Private Offers And Multiparty Private Offers On Microsoft Marketplace
A private offer is a custom, negotiated deal between you and a specific customer, custom pricing, custom terms, a specific contract duration, sitting outside the standard published pricing on your listing. This is the standard tool for enterprise deals, renewals with negotiated discounts, or basically any situation where the published plan doesn’t match what you and the customer actually agreed to.
A multiparty private offer (MPO) works the same way, except now there’s a channel partner in the mix too. You create the offer and hand it off to the partner, they finalize it and send it on to their customer, the customer buys it through the Azure portal, and Microsoft splits the invoicing and payout between you and the partner. It’s basically what makes channel-led marketplace deals possible without you having to personally originate every single one.
A few things worth sorting before you actually try to set one up:
✅ Your channel partner has a completed tax profile in Partner Center
✅ They’re based in one of the 35-plus supported countries or regions (EU, UK, US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and a handful of others)
✅ If they’re in the US, they have resale certificates on file too
Resale authorizations sit alongside all this, deciding which partners can actually resell your offers in the first place. And payment terms carry across all three of these, private offers, MPOs, and resale authorizations, which is exactly why it matters that the term you negotiate actually holds, no matter which structure the deal ends up closing under.
If you want the fuller picture of how Microsoft co-sell fits into all this, Labra’s help center has a simple overview of co-selling with Microsoft worth checking out.
Co-Selling On Microsoft Marketplace: Tiers, MACC, And The PDM Relationship
Co-sell isn’t a status you achieve once and move on from. It’s an ongoing motion, opportunity registration, account mapping, and joint selling alongside Microsoft’s own field teams, sustained over time rather than treated as a one-time unlock.
The current co-sell tiers, exactly as Microsoft defines them today:
- In market. Your solution is linked to a live Microsoft Marketplace offer, but hasn’t yet met co-sell-ready requirements.
- Co-sell ready. You have an active PartnerID and Partner Center account, a complete business profile, a live published offer, a named sales contact for every co-sell-eligible geography, and the required listing documentation on file.
- Azure IP co-sell eligible. The top tier for Azure Application, Container, VM, and SaaS offers. To reach it, on top of everything co-sell ready requires, you need at least $100,000 in Azure Consumed Revenue or Marketplace Billed Sales over the trailing 12 months (Azure credits don’t count toward this), you need to pass Microsoft’s technical validation as a solution primarily platformed on Azure, and your offer needs to be transactable on Microsoft Marketplace.
- Business Applications co-sell eligible. A separate track for IP-based solutions built on Dynamics 365 apps on Dataverse, Power Apps, or Dynamics 365 Operations Apps, which requires ISV Success enrollment alongside co-sell-ready status.
That’s the tier where Microsoft’s own field sales teams actually start bringing you into deals, instead of you simply existing as a visible entry in their systems.
None of this works without your Partner Development Manager, and this is where most ISVs quietly drop the ball. PDMs are juggling way more partners than they can give real attention to, and they’re judged on consumption and committed-spend numbers, so they gravitate toward whoever makes their job easiest. If your PDM relationship isn’t paying off, it’s usually one of three things: your role in the deal isn’t obvious, you’re treating co-sell as a one-off instead of a habit, or your tracking is messy enough that they can’t see your pipeline without asking.
The fix is just doing the opposite. Show up with a clear opportunity already mapped out, connect it explicitly to what your PDM actually gets measured on, keep your pipeline visible to both sides, and do it the same way every time instead of reinventing it per deal. Get that right, and the relationship stops being an occasional win and starts being something you can actually count on. Stuck on this part? Labra’s own breakdown of why PDM relationships stall is worth a read.
Microsoft Partner Programs: ISV Success, Marketplace Rewards, And MACC
A short, practical rundown of the programs worth knowing about, beyond co-sell status itself:
ISV Success Program. Technical enablement and support for ISVs building on Azure, and, as mentioned above, a prerequisite specifically for the Business Applications co-sell track.
Marketplace Rewards. Milestone-based benefits tied to marketplace revenue and engagement, unlocked automatically as you hit certain thresholds, rather than something you have to individually apply for.
FastTrack for Azure. Technical guidance and architecture support aimed at accelerating deployment, most relevant once you’re actively working a specific enterprise opportunity rather than at initial listing.
MACC, already covered in depth above, deserves a second mention here specifically as a program worth actively planning around, not just a mechanic to passively understand. Getting your offer to Azure IP co-sell eligible status is what unlocks MACC-eligible purchasing for your customers, and that single milestone is what ties together nearly everything else in this section: co-sell status, procurement speed, and ultimately deal size.
Common Microsoft Marketplace Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)
Publishing “list only” and stopping there. A list-only offer gets you discovery. It gets you neither MACC eligibility nor a path to co-sell. If the actual goal is pipeline, not just a presence in the catalog, transactability isn’t optional, it’s the whole point.
Treating Partner Center as a one-time setup task. Pricing changes, new plans, private offers, and co-sell documentation all need ongoing attention. Offers that go stale lose both discoverability and co-sell standing, quietly, without an alert telling you it happened.
Managing private offers and contracts manually past the first handful of deals. What works fine for three enterprise deals a quarter breaks down at ten, and breaks down badly at thirty, especially once payment terms, resale authorizations, and MPOs are all in play at the same time across different deals.
Running marketplace pipeline disconnected from your CRM. If your sales team can’t see co-sell referrals, private offer status, and contract details from the systems they already work in every day, marketplace activity turns into a side channel instead of a core part of the pipeline, and it gets treated that way internally too.
Treating the PDM relationship as passive. Covered in detail above, and worth repeating here because it’s genuinely one of the highest-leverage relationships in the entire motion, and also the one most commonly left entirely to chance.
Microsoft Marketplace And Co-Sell KPIs Worth Tracking
Keep this list short, and grounded in what actually predicts revenue rather than what looks good on a dashboard.
Pipeline metrics: co-sell referrals received, private offers issued and currently in progress.
Conversion and velocity metrics: time to reach co-sell ready status, time to reach Azure IP co-sell eligible, time from referral to closed deal.
Revenue metrics: marketplace-influenced revenue, Azure Consumed Revenue tied to your offers, MACC-eligible purchase volume.
Engagement metrics: PDM meeting cadence, Partner Center activity, meaning offer updates and documentation actually staying current.
If you’re only going to track one thing, track time-to-Azure-IP-co-sell-eligible. Every other metric on this list gets easier the moment that milestone is reached, because that’s the point where Microsoft’s own field sales genuinely starts working alongside you instead of around you.
Automating Microsoft Marketplace Operations At Scale
Everything above is manageable by hand at small volume: a handful of private offers, one or two listing types, a single PDM relationship you can keep entirely in your head. It stops being manageable the moment any of those multiply, and for a growing ISV, that happens faster than most teams actually plan for.
Here’s what changes once you’re running Microsoft Marketplace at real scale:
Offer and contract status synced into your CRM, so sales sees marketplace pipeline in the system they already live in every day, instead of it sitting isolated inside Partner Center.
Private offers generated and tracked systematically, including the payment term flexibility and multiparty structures covered above, rather than assembled by hand, deal by deal, by whoever happens to be free.
Metering and revenue reconciliation handled automatically, so usage-based billing and payout tracking don’t depend on someone remembering to go check Partner Center.
Real-time notifications on the events that actually matter: a co-sell referral coming in, a private offer getting accepted, a contract approaching renewal.
Cross-cloud management, for the increasingly common reality of running Microsoft Marketplace alongside AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace, rather than treating each one as its own separate, disconnected operation.
This is exactly why we built Labra: container and SaaS listings, private offers and MPOs, CRM-synced co-sell pipeline, and multi-cloud operations, all in one place, instead of stitching together Partner Center, a CRM, and a handful of spreadsheets that everyone half-trusts. If any of this sounds familiar, see how Labra handles cloud marketplace automation, or get in touch for a walkthrough.
