AWS Marketplace

How to create a free trial offer for SaaS usage-based pricing products in AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is announcing free trials for SaaS usage-based (pay-as-you-go) pricing products, an extension of the free trials for SaaS contracts experience that was introduced on May 31, 2022. Free trials in AWS Marketplace offer customers an opportunity to evaluate SaaS products before making a purchase. As a software vendor, offering free trials in AWS Marketplace can help you increase the number of potential customers who will consider and purchase your product when evaluating which SaaS solutions meet their needs.

In this blog post, Jesus and I will show you how to create a free trial offer for your SaaS usage-based pricing product in AWS Marketplace. For SaaS contract products, visit the How to create a free trial offer for SaaS contract products in AWS Marketplace blog post.

Prerequisites

You must complete the following prerequisites to offer a free trial for a SaaS usage-based pricing product in AWS Marketplace:

Solution walkthrough: How to create a free trial offer for SaaS usage-based pricing products in AWS Marketplace

To create a free trial offer for SaaS usage-based pricing products in AWS Marketplace, do the following.

Step 1: Create a free trial offer in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal

  1. Sign in to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.
  2. In the AWS Marketplace console right panel, choose Create or manage offers. Alternatively, in the top banner, select the Offers tab.
  3. Select the Public free trials tab, and then choose Create free trial offer.
  4. On the Offer fundamentals screen, select a product for which you want to offer a free trial, and then choose Next.
  5. On the Offer metadata screen, do the following:
    • Enter the free trial duration in days. You can select any duration from 7–90 days.
    • Select standard AWS Marketplace terms or upload a custom end user license agreement (EULA).
    • Choose Review offer. The offer metadata page for the product lists the name of the offer and the length of the free trial. It shows product dimensions and which service agreement you selected. Review the offer.
  1. Select Create offer. You should see a confirmation message stating that the offer has been created. Wait for a few minutes to see changes in the AWS Marketplace product detail page for the selected product.

Step 2: Review your free trial offer in AWS Marketplace

  1. To review your free trial offer, sign in to AWS Marketplace and navigate to your product’s detail page. In the upper left under the product title, you should see a green Free trial badge. In the upper right, you should see a green Try for free button.
  2. To verify the free trial offer details, review the procurement page. Choose the Try for free button.

Step 3: Access SaaS free trials daily reports

To get automated daily SaaS free trial reports into your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, you must configure access to AWS Marketplace data feeds. Data feeds are delivered daily at 00:00 UTC following an update from the previous day and contain 24 hours of data.

The Agreement Details report is a new supplemental report that helps you understand the SaaS usage-based pricing free trial agreements. The report includes agreement details such as is_free_trial_offer, subscriber name and id, offer_id, and agreement start and end date. As soon as you get free trial subscribers, you will receive this report automatically. To access a daily report, do the following:

  1. In the AWS Management Console, navigate to the S3 bucket you used when onboarding to the data feeds feature. Locate the AgreementDetailsReport_v1 folder.
  2. Open the AgreementDetailsReport_v1 folder. To find the free trials report for a particular day, open the corresponding year and month folders.
  3. Inside the selected year’s folder, select the desired month.
  4. Inside the selected month’s folder, you will find the daily reports, one for each day. To view agreement details, select and download the daily report.

Step 4: Identify free trial customers (optional)

You can provide a custom, account-provisioning workflow to prospects signing up for free trials, including a custom landing page experience. To do that, identify the offer type through Amazon SNS notification and HTTP POST parameter. You can choose one of the following options:

Option 1

Whenever a customer subscribes to your product in AWS Marketplace, you receive an Amazon SNS notification with a successful subscription message. For a free trial offer, isFreeTrialTermPresent flag will be set to true in aws-mp-subscription-notification.

{
“action”: “<action-name>”,
“customer-identifier”: “X01EXAMPLEX”,
“product-code”: “n0123EXAMPLEXXXXXXXXXXXX”,
“offer-identifier”: “offer-abcexample123”,
“isFreeTrialTermPresent”: “true”
}

Option 2

After a customer subscribes to your product, they are redirected to your registration URL, which is an HTTP POST request with a temporary x-amzn-marketplace-token parameter. If a subscription is a free trial, a second parameter x-amzn-marketplace-offer-type with the value free-trial will be added to the request. You can use the token to validate the customer and show a custom landing page.

Conclusion

In this post, Jesus and I showed you how to create a free trial offer for your SaaS usage-based pricing products in AWS Marketplace, very similar to the current capability with contract-based products.

We showed you how to identify free trial customers and provide a tailored landing page experience using Amazon SNS notifications and HTTP POST flag. We also showed how to track free trial customers. Although trials can expire, you can negotiate with your customers and potentially help them transition into paid subscriptions through the supplemental agreement details report.

If you are a registered seller and have questions about this feature, contact the AWS Marketplace team by filling out the Contact Us form in your seller portal.

About the authors

Jesus Rodriguez is a Specialist Solutions Architect focusing on AWS Marketplace. Jesus enjoys helping customers govern their cloud environments and automate their deployments in AWS. Outside work, Jesus enjoys retro gaming on multiple platforms as well as playing sports like tennis.
Kunjal is a Sr. Product Manager in AWS Marketplace focusing on SaaS products. Prior to AWS, Kunjal was a Product Manager at Akamai where he helped build products and services strategy for web performance optimization solutions. Outside of work, he enjoys playing a game of chess and solving Sudoku.