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# What it costs to get listed: the fee, the gate, and the five marketplaces that matter
- URL: https://www.datadab.com/blog/what-it-costs-to-get-listed/
- Published: 2026-11-02T04:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-02T04:30:00.000Z
- Description: The listing fee is rarely what costs you. The review gate is, and most ecosystems are not worth passing through it. Here is how to pick five.
- Author: Amit Ashwini
- Tags: GTM

*Vendors are told to join dozens of ecosystems. The data says a handful carry the category, and the listing fee is the least expensive part of being accepted.*

A founder told me last month that his team had booked sixty engineering days for marketplace coverage. Six platforms, a spreadsheet of signup links.

He had no answer when I asked which of them a buyer in his segment actually searches for.

We counted what 479 B2B software companies really do, in [the integration and marketplace study](https://www.datadab.com/research/b2b-saas-integration-marketplace-study): 1,571 company-to-platform connections across 47 named ecosystems, crawled in October 2026.

Then we laid the published listing terms beside it.

Two findings outrank the roadmap those plans produce. Most ecosystems cost nothing to list in. Most are not worth the review process.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-01-hero-1.png)

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-02-five-ecosystems-carry-the-catego-1.png)

## Five ecosystems carry the category, and the other forty-two are decoration

Slack sits at 24.0% of the cohort, 115 companies, ahead of Salesforce AppExchange at 17.3% (83).

Google Workspace and HubSpot tie at 15.2% (73 apiece), then Zapier at 14.0% (67), Microsoft Teams at 13.8% (66), Jira at 12.5% (60).

Below that the slope falls away fast.

| Ecosystem                  | Companies | Cohort share |
| -------------------------- | --------- | ------------ |
| Shopify App Store          | 55        | 11.5%        |
| GitHub Marketplace or Apps | 52        | 10.9%        |
| Snowflake                  | 48        | 10.0%        |
| QuickBooks App Store       | 47        | 9.8%         |
| Stripe App Marketplace     | 46        | 9.6%         |
| Zendesk Marketplace        | 45        | 9.4%         |
| Okta or Auth0              | 45        | 9.4%         |
| Oracle NetSuite            | 41        | 8.6%         |

At the far end sit Zoom at 4.8%, Workato at 1.5%, AWS Marketplace at 1.0%, Pipedream at 0.8%, Azure Marketplace at 0.6%, Tray.io at 0.4% and Google Cloud Marketplace at 0.2%.

One company out of 479.

In the automation lane the gap is equally lopsided. Zapier's footprint is 3.9x n8n at 3.5% and 4.2x Make at 3.3%, with Workato, Pipedream and Tray.io together barely registering.

Note what the long tail is made of: Notion at 6.1%, Linear and Discord and Datadog and Bitbucket at 4.4% each, Sentry at 2.7%.

That is developer tooling, and it reflects a cohort of venture-backed software companies more than it reflects what a mid-market buyer searches for.

Meanwhile 252 of 479 companies (52.6%) publish an integration hub, and 222 (46.3%) connect to at least one of the 47 ecosystems we tracked. A hub is a page. Connections are engineering.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-03-listing-is-usually-free-and-free-1.png)

## Listing is usually free, and "free" is the wrong question

Read the fee column across the fourteen primary marketplaces.

Slack, 0% and a free listing. HubSpot, 0% to list, with a certified tier that requires customer installs.

Google Workspace, 0%, plus a CASA security assessment if you ask for restricted Drive or Gmail scopes.

Zapier, 0%, and the partner builds and maintains the connector. QuickBooks, 0% for standard OAuth integrations. Stripe, 0% listing fee. Chrome Web Store, a $5 one-time developer registration.

So the question is never the fee. The question is what you give up, and how long the review takes.

That reframing is worth sixty engineering days on its own. A plan organised around listing fees is a plan organised around the only number that does not matter.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-04-the-fee-you-actually-pay-is-the--1.png)

## The fee you actually pay is the review gate

Salesforce takes 15% revenue share, or a partner programme fee, and gates with a mandatory AppExchange Security Review. That is a paid fee plus a pen-test or scanner check.

Atlassian takes 15%-20% on paid Forge and Connect apps and nothing on free connectors, behind a marketplace security and privacy review with an optional Cloud Fortified badge.

GitHub takes nothing on free or bring-your-own-license apps and 20% on GitHub-billed listings, after app permission and webhook review plus publisher verification for billing.

Microsoft AppSource and the Teams store take a 3% transaction fee behind publisher verification and Microsoft 365 app compliance validation.

QuickBooks adds Intuit's technical, security and marketing review, with annual security questionnaires. Google adds OAuth verification and the CASA assessment. Chrome Web Store requires manifest compliance and permission justification.

Sixty days in a review queue that wants a pen-test, scope justification and a signed questionnaire is not a free listing. It is a paid one with the invoice elsewhere.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-05-shopify-shows-where-the-cut-real-1.png)

## Shopify shows where the cut really lands

The most instructive line in the ledger is Shopify: 0% on the first $1M of lifetime gross app revenue, then 15%, with strict automated and manual review and mandatory GDPR webhooks.

Zendesk is the same shape from the other side: 0% for free apps, and a take-rate through Stripe the moment you charge.

The cloud marketplaces charge 3%, drawn down against an enterprise cloud commit, so the fee is effectively a discount on money the buyer had already promised Microsoft or Amazon.

Pattern: the cut arrives when you charge money, and the gate arrives before you can.

Which means a marketplace strategy that monetises nothing pays no revenue share and still pays the full review cost.

Ask that question before you commit a sprint: what does this listing earn, and in whose budget?

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-06-which-ecosystem-follows-which-mo-1.png)

## Which ecosystem follows which motion

The cohort splits by pricing model, and the split is stark enough to plan against.

| Vendor motion           | Zapier | Salesforce | Named ecosystems overall |
| ----------------------- | ------ | ---------- | ------------------------ |
| Per-seat SaaS           | 28.6%  | 27.0%      | 68.3%                    |
| Contact-only enterprise | 12.2%  | 23.5%      | lower, and later         |

Per-seat tools are the most integration-dense group in the sample, at 68.3% connecting to at least one named ecosystem.

Contact-only enterprise vendors skip Zapier, and they are the ones who build for HR systems. Workday shows up in 11.3% of that group against 2.0% of usage-based vendors.

A workflow tool chasing Salesforce and a procurement portal while selling to ops teams of six has the map backwards. It usually got that map from a slide about ecosystem breadth.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-07-sequencing-is-not-a-preference-1.png)

## Sequencing is not a preference

Of the 66 companies with a Microsoft Teams integration, 61 (92.4%) also have Slack. Nearly half of Slack integrators have not built for Teams.

Of the 73 companies on HubSpot, 57 (78.1%) also support Salesforce.

Slack is the entry ticket. Teams is the upmarket follow-on. Build the second before the first and you have paid a review gate for a buyer who has not arrived.

Presence overall climbs from 33.3% at 1-10 employees to 73.2% at 200+, and the steepest jumps are Salesforce at 4.2x (10.9% to 46.3%) and Okta or Auth0 at 3.4x (7.8% to 26.8%) around the 200-employee mark.

Those two are not growth ambitions. They are what an enterprise security review asks for, which is why they appear when the first enterprise contract does.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-08-the-procurement-portals-1-7-of-t-1.png)

## The procurement portals 1.7% of the cohort is in

If you sell upmarket you hear it constantly: enterprise buyers procure through cloud marketplaces. In this cohort AWS Marketplace is 1.0%, Azure 0.6%, Google Cloud 0.2%.

The reason is not ignorance. Cloud marketplace listing means vendor onboarding, tax and banking verification, and financial technical review or container and SaaS contract wiring.

That is a finance project with an engineering tail. It pays out only when a buyer intends to spend a committed cloud budget.

So do it once one exists. It is not a coverage task.

If you cannot name the account that will buy through it, defer it, and put the days into the five ecosystems that already carry your category.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-09-sixty-engineering-days-spent-in--1.png)

## Sixty engineering days, spent in order

Take the number from that founder's plan and spend it like this.

Five ecosystems your buyer already pays for, chosen from the adoption table rather than from a vendor's partner badge.

Then the security and identity work enterprise procurement asks for, since Okta and Salesforce arrive with the first big contract instead of before it.

Then the two or three your pricing motion predicts, per-seat or contact-only. Then, and only then, a marketplace whose fee you can justify with a named deal.

Write a page per integration that answers what data crosses, which way, what breaks when the connection dies, and who maintains it.

Then keep that page current when the connector changes, because a stale integration page reads like an abandoned product.

An app listing without a real page is a logo in a directory your buyer never opens. The page is the asset; the listing is the receipt.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-10-who-this-is-for-1.png)

## Who this is for

\* *Founders told to get marketplace coverage:*\* the fee column is a rounding error next to review time. Pick five, name the buyer segment that searches for them, cancel the rest.

\* *Product marketing and GTM leads:*\* use the motion split. Your pricing model predicts integration density better than your roadmap does, and that is a useful sentence to put in a planning meeting.

\* *Buyers shortlisting vendors:*\* an integration hub with documented pages, not a logo strip, is the honest signal of what you can connect. Absence from a cloud marketplace tells you almost nothing about fit.

\* *Researchers:*\* the full 47-ecosystem table, the matching rules and the fee ledger live on the study page with the crawl date. Cite that.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-11-a-note-on-how-confident-we-are-2.png)

## A note on how confident we are

All 479 companies come from the Y Combinator B2B software dataset, so developer and AI-native tools are more common here than in legacy mid-market software. That is a venture-backed bias, stated plainly.

We counted only what a company shows on its own domain and sitemap. A listing that exists on AppExchange but is never linked or documented on the vendor's site is not in these numbers.

A catalog rendered purely client-side, with no server-rendered HTML or sitemap entry, can be missed. So treat every share here as a floor rather than a ceiling.

The matching rules were ordered by evidence strength: a link to the canonical marketplace domain first, then a dedicated integration URL slug, then a word-bounded connector or SSO documentation slug, then a listing on a verified hub after stripping navigation and scripts.

That stripping matters, because error-monitoring SDKs and social links otherwise get counted as product integrations.

Fees and gates are the marketplaces' published terms, read in October 2026, and they change without notice. Verify against the marketplace's own documentation before budgeting against a number here.

![](https://www.datadab.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/what-it-costs-to-get-listed-12-wrap-up-1.png)

## Wrap-up

Five ecosystems carry the category. The review gate is the real fee. Your pricing model predicts where to build before your roadmap does.

Coverage is not a goal. It is a by-product of knowing who buys you.

Want to see whether your own pages carry the facts a reviewer and a crawler both look for? [Scan the integration and pricing pages a buyer reads first](https://www.datadab.com/tools/decision-friction-scanner).

Adoption counts come from 479 YC-backed B2B software companies crawled in October 2026, first-party pages and sitemaps only. Listing terms are the marketplaces' published rules, read in the same month.

[Scan the pages buyers and reviewers read](https://www.datadab.com/tools/decision-friction-scanner)