When you publish software through a marketplace, you’re making a bet: that the platform’s terms won’t change, that the payment processing will keep working, that your listing won’t be de-prioritized, that you won’t get suspended for a policy violation you didn’t notice.

Most of the time, the bet pays off. Marketplaces are reliable enough. The distribution advantages are real. You go where the users are.

But the bet is real. And the more your revenue depends on a single platform, the larger the bet.

What Platform Dependency Actually Means

Platform dependency is not just “they could ban me.” It’s subtler:

  • The platform changes its revenue share from 85% to 70% — you can’t easily leave because your users are already there
  • The platform adds a competing product to the same category and promotes it first
  • The platform’s payment processing has an outage and your users can’t pay for two days
  • The platform requires a CLI tool that you can’t install in your environment
  • The platform’s discovery algorithm changes and your ranking drops without explanation

None of these require bad faith on the platform’s part. They’re just the natural risks of dependency. Every distribution advantage the platform provides comes with a corresponding constraint.

The Self-Hosted Alternative

An alternative has existed for a long time but only recently became accessible: add the payment layer directly to your product, bypass the marketplace entirely, and control your own billing.

For APIs and developer tools, this looks like:

  • Embed a payment SDK at the API boundary
  • Charge per-invocation, per-seat, or per-month directly
  • Users bring their payment method to you, not to a marketplace
  • You control pricing, trial terms, refund policy, and data

The setup is more work. You’re building or integrating a billing system instead of listing on a platform. But once it’s running, the constraints are yours. You choose the payment processor. You set the terms. A platform outage is not your outage.

The Tradeoff Is Real

This isn’t an argument that self-hosted payment is always better. Marketplaces provide real things that are hard to replicate:

  • Discovery: Users browse the marketplace looking for tools. Self-hosted means you generate all your own traffic.
  • Trust: A listing on a known marketplace is pre-credentialed. An unknown payment page requires more user trust.
  • Reduced friction: Users who already have accounts on the marketplace don’t need to create new ones with you.

For a new product with no existing audience, a marketplace is probably the right starting point. The distribution advantage is too large to ignore.

The Hybrid That Works

The position with the most optionality: publish on the marketplace, but build your own billing stack too.

Launch on the marketplace first — leverage the distribution, acquire initial users, validate the product. In parallel, build the self-hosted billing path. Then, as your product matures and your audience grows, migrate users toward the direct path.

The goal isn’t to leave the marketplace. It’s to ensure that leaving is an option.

A business that could survive losing its main distribution channel is more resilient than one that couldn’t. That resilience has value even when you never need to use it.

The Telling Test

A useful question when evaluating distribution strategy: “If this platform disappeared tomorrow, what would happen to my revenue?”

If the answer is “it would all disappear,” your risk exposure is high regardless of how reliable the platform has been.

If the answer is “we’d have a hard month but we’d recover,” you’ve built real resilience.

The goal isn’t paranoia about platforms. It’s building a business that doesn’t require any single party to behave well forever.