Amazon taxes software at 20% and the consultant’s hours at 0.5%.

Start with the page that prices everything, because it is published and it is short. AWS Marketplace’s seller guide states that listing fees are “calculated based on the pre-tax Total Contract Value” and that the schedule is “effective as of January 5, 2024 at midnight UTC.” Public offers: server — machine image, container and machine learning — at 20%; SaaS at 3%; AWS Data Exchange at 3%. Private offers by contract value: under $1M at 3%, $1M to $10M at 2%, above that 1.5%, and all renewals at 1.5%. Then, at the bottom of the same table, professional services private offers at 0.5%.

That last line is new twice over. On 16 June 2026 AWS posted that “AWS Marketplace now offers a 0.5% listing fee for professional services private offers, reduced from 2.5%,” that the rate “applies in all AWS Regions where AWS Marketplace operates, across all pricing models and currencies,” and that partners with existing listings “benefit automatically.” On 1 September 2026 it posted a second cut: professional services bundled into a multi-product solution now carry a 0% listing fee, provided the set contains “at least one other valid, paid subscription.” The fee page spells out the test — an agreement for every offer in the set, at least one non-services product whose “dimensions are not priced at $0,” and a sibling agreement that has not been cancelled, where “active, expired, renewed, and replaced agreements all continue to qualify.”

So inside one marketplace the cheapest thing to sell is the thing with no engineering cost, no hosting cost and no inventory. A dollar of machine-image revenue is taxed 40× harder than a dollar of consulting revenue. A dollar of SaaS revenue is taxed 6× harder. The entire public argument about marketplace rake — thirty per cent, fifteen per cent, who deserves what — is being had about the dear end of a table whose cheap end almost nobody reads.

Check it against the other two shops, because a single venue’s pricing could be an accident. Microsoft’s partner documentation, last updated 23 July 2026, says plainly: “Microsoft charges a 3% standard store service fee when customers purchase your transact offer from Microsoft Marketplace,” deducted “at the time of publisher payout,” with a worked example — on a $100 monthly licence “Microsoft pays you 97%” and “keeps 3%.” Professional services are transactable there, but footnote 6 confines them: “Professional Services are only available to transact through a private offer.” Same product, same shape of deal, six times the fee.

Google’s position is sharper still, and it is about the buyer rather than the seller. Its Marketplace commitment-drawdown page, updated 22 October 2026, says 100% of spend on Marketplace services counts against a customer’s Minimum Commitment — then lists what does not, and Professional Services is on the exclusion list beside Google Ads and Google Maps. Microsoft says the same thing in its own words: MACC-eligible offers “decrement the customer’s MACC by the amounts invoiced,” but “professional services aren’t MACC eligible.” Two of the three hyperscalers have decided that a consultant’s invoice is not cloud spending. The third cut its fee on that invoice to zero.

Now the reason, which is where this stops being a fee comparison. AWS wrote the answer down on 22 September 2026, in a partner-network post by Vincent Petit of AWS Marketplace Business Development and Steven Matz, Partner Growth and Strategy Lead. The post is about variable payments: a seller can “set contract caps and create payment requests throughout project delivery,” billing on milestones or time and materials, with charges appearing “automatically on customers’ AWS invoices.” Tom Lynch, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Smarsh, is quoted saying that before this there “was no mechanism for variable payments in AWS Marketplace.” Satish Lakshmanan of Accenture, Jim Keller of Quantiphi and WD Land of Slalom are quoted alongside him. AWS is not discounting services out of generosity; it is buying the hours that attach to its own consumption, and it has priced them below everything else on the shelf to get them.

Which makes the entry conditions the interesting part, and they are published too. The seller-eligibility page requires an AWS account in good standing, a valid non-alias email, tax information on a W-9 or W-8, a bank account in an eligible jurisdiction that can accept USD, bank verification, and — the one line specific to this product — that “professional services providers must complete the Tax Questionnaire for DAC7.” It does not require an AWS Partner tier. It does not require a software product. The getting-started page asks only that your service be “related to an AWS service or at least one public product in AWS Marketplace,” in one of five categories — Assessments, Implementation, Managed services, Premium support, Training — and says the listing appears in limited preview “within a few minutes,” with public-catalogue review taking “several days.” Nowhere in any of it is a price to be there.

Here is the reading nobody holds. The marketplace fee debate is a debate about products, and it has trained everyone to assume the rake is the cost of distribution. On the largest cloud marketplace the rake is an instrument: 20% where Amazon is renting you a storefront, 0.5% where it wants what you are selling, 0% where you are selling it alongside something that drives consumption. A person with $500 cannot write a server product. They can write an assessment, list it in minutes against someone else’s public product, bill it in milestones against a contract cap, and have Amazon take half of one per cent — or nothing — on the way to 330,000 active customers who are already its account holders.