Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace Publishing

Your audience decides it. AppSource is where business users find apps that work with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform — Teams apps, Office add-ins, industry SaaS. Azure Marketplace is where IT professionals and developers find solutions built on or deployed into Azure — VMs, containers, managed applications, and developer-facing SaaS. Microsoft now fronts both with the unified Microsoft Marketplace, but the storefront targeting still shapes categories, search, and who sees you. We settle this in the offer-strategy milestone, in writing.

A transactable offer means Microsoft bills the customer and pays you out, rather than just referring the lead to you. It unlocks purchases through customers' existing Microsoft billing, private offers with custom pricing, and sales motions through Microsoft's channel. The cost is real engineering: a landing page, Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on, the SaaS Fulfillment API, and a webhook that handles the subscription lifecycle. If you mainly want visibility and lead capture, a listing or trial offer gets you live with far less work — and you can upgrade to transactable later.

Publishing is free — there is no listing fee. For transactable offers, Microsoft retains an agency fee on each sale, currently 3% under Microsoft's published terms (it was cut from an industry-typical 20% in 2021). Non-transactable listings and trials carry no per-sale fee at all, because Microsoft handles no money. The rate and its conditions are Microsoft's and can change; we confirm current terms during offer strategy.

The engagement is scoped at three weeks, which assumes your app is certification-ready and your side turns fixes around promptly. The two variables neither of us fully controls are publisher verification — which depends on your legal and banking paperwork — and Microsoft's certification review, where each failed cycle adds days. A clean listing-only offer can move faster; a transactable SaaS offer with integration work still to do will take longer, and we will tell you that before you commit.

Yes, and you can verify both claims on Microsoft's own sites rather than taking our word. Our Tenant Optimizer application is listed on Microsoft Marketplace under IT Partner's publisher account, and our ITP Assistant Teams app is Microsoft 365 App Certified, with the attestation published on Microsoft Learn. We also hold the Microsoft Solutions Partner designation for Digital & App Innovation. The scars from our own certification cycles are a large part of what you are buying.

Four things, all mandatory for certification: a landing page where the buyer lands after purchase and activates the subscription; Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on on that page; integration with the SaaS Fulfillment API v2, which is how your service resolves and activates the purchase; and a webhook endpoint that handles lifecycle events — plan changes, suspensions, cancellations. We give your developers the checklist against Microsoft's current documentation, review what they build, and test the whole lifecycle with preview purchases before submission.

It gets fixed and resubmitted — that loop is inside the fixed price, not an extra. Certification failures cite Microsoft's marketplace policies, which name the violated rule but rarely the remedy; translating a policy citation into the actual fix is where most first-time publishers burn weeks. Common failures are listing-content problems, broken or non-compliant trial and purchase flows, and transactable integrations that do not survive lifecycle testing.

You do, from day one. We work inside your Partner Center under access you grant and can revoke at any time — the same least-privilege stance we take with every customer tenant. Your publisher identity, your customer relationships, your payout profile. When the engagement ends, nothing about your marketplace presence depends on us.

Yes, as separate, separately quoted development scope — this engagement deliberately prices the publishing work alone. Our development team builds on the Microsoft stack daily: see Microsoft Graph API Mastery and Integration Services for API and integration work and Custom Agent Development with Microsoft Copilot Studio for agent-based products. If the gap between your app and certification is code, we will scope that honestly before you spend on publishing.

Private offers let you sell a transactable offer to a specific customer at negotiated pricing and terms — the marketplace equivalent of an enterprise deal. And when an Azure Marketplace offer meets Microsoft's Azure-benefit eligibility requirements, customer purchases can count toward their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment — which means enterprise buyers can spend already-committed Azure budget on your product. For ISVs selling to enterprises, this is often the single strongest argument for going transactable, and we configure the offer with it in mind.

The listing is yours to run, and the handover session makes sure you can: editing content, changing plans and pricing, reading marketplace insights, and knowing which edits trigger re-certification. Ongoing marketplace operations — campaigns, listing optimization, co-sell management — are outside this engagement. If you want continuing help, our consulting services cover it as a separate arrangement, starting with a free 30-minute session to scope what you actually need.