Why they called
The client had a real product: a feed of high-confidence indicators with a clean REST API. What they did not have was a way to sell it through AWS procurement. Two prior submission attempts had bounced — one on IAM granularity, one on a CloudFormation parameter the AWS validator did not accept. Each rejection cycle cost roughly six weeks of engineering time.
Their sales team had three live mid-market deals stuck in procurement, each waiting on an AWS Marketplace listing so the buyer could put the spend on their existing AWS contract instead of opening a new vendor.
What we shipped
Week one: SaaS contracts model selected (versus AMI, versus CloudFormation transactional), pricing dimensions mapped to their internal metering, EULA reviewed against the AWS Marketplace seller agreement. Listing artwork sized for the three placements that matter.
Week two and three: registration, metering, and entitlement-check microservices implemented against the AWS Marketplace Metering and Entitlement APIs. Telemetry pipeline writing back to the client's support tooling so the support team can see customer state without opening the AWS console.
Week four: listing copy written without marketing fluff (specs, integrations, deployment time, exact AWS regions supported), listing submitted. Week five: certification feedback addressed in one cycle, listing approved and published.
What happened after publish
Eleven days after the listing went live, the first of the three stalled deals closed via Marketplace procurement. The other two closed within forty-five days. The Marketplace channel now accounts for the majority of new mid-market contracts.