Forum Discussion
Moving from Private Plans to Private Offers — Should We Make the Switch?
Hi Azure Marketplace community,
We, at https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saturaminc.qualdo_drx are currently using private plans to handle custom pricing for specific customers, and we're evaluating whether it makes sense to transition to private offers. Would love to hear from others who've made this move — or who've deliberately stayed on private plans.
Here's where we're at: private plans have served us well for restricting visibility and offering tiered pricing to select tenants, but as our deal complexity has grown (more enterprise customers, negotiated terms, channel partners), we're starting to feel some of the limitations.
A few things pushing us toward private offers:
- Custom pricing flexibility — Private offers let us set percentage discounts or absolute prices per customer without creating a new plan for every deal. As our customer base grows, managing individual plans is getting unwieldy.
- Multi-party / channel support — We work with some resellers and CSPs. Private offers seem to support that flow much better with multi-party private offers (MPPO).
- Are there scenarios where private plans are still the better choice over private offers?
- How are you handling the coexistence of both during a transition period?
- Any impact on reporting, billing, or reconciliation we should be aware of?
We want to make sure we're not solving one problem and creating another. Appreciate any real-world experiences!.
Thanks in Advance,
Kavitha Srinivasan
Hi Kavitha,
Yes, the guidance right now is to move towards private offers since they are much more flexible, have more features and are much easier to manage / scale.
To answer your questions, specifically:1. The only case where private plans are still used is when you absolutely do not want to show any kind of public presence / offer on the Marketplace. As you know, private offers are built on top of live, public plans - so if that is not an option for your org, then private plans remains the only vehicle to transact,
2. There are no issues in using both private plans and private offers on the same offer at the same time across different customers. The only point I would highlight is renewals - When issuing a private offer a new planId is created behind the scenes so a customer that is already subscribed to the offer via private plan will have to resubscribe to the private offer at renewal as you can't auto-renew in a different plan.
3. No changes at all in reporting, billing, revenue, etc...
The last thing that I'd like to highlight are two the best features available only on private offers that might bring a significant benefit:
1. Renewals done though private offers are eligible for a 50% agency fee discount -> Agency fee discount for renewals - Marketplace publisher | Microsoft Learn
2. Ability to create flexible billing schedules (milestone based) as part of private offers -> Creating flexible schedules in a private offer - Marketplace publisher | Microsoft Learn
Hope this helps.
Alex
4 Replies
Thanks a lot for the explanation alexdrenea-ms That helps a lot
Kavitha — worth flagging one more consideration that often gets missed in this decision: the new post-QRP co-sell matching in Partner Center also responds to offer structure.
Private offers create a stronger signal for Microsoft's AI matching because they indicate enterprise deal readiness — the system interprets multi-party offer capability as a marker of GTM maturity. Partners still on public-plan-only listings tend to get matched to smaller, less-qualified inbounds.
On your specific questions: private plans are still useful for straightforward tiered pricing where you don't need per-customer negotiation. The coexistence period is fine — most partners run both in parallel while migrating enterprise accounts. The main reconciliation catch is that private offer revenue shows up under a different report view in Partner Center than plan-based transactions, so your finance team needs to know where to look.
One practical note: if you do make the switch, update your co-sell one-pager to reflect the private offer purchasing path — the new Referrals workspace schema expects that alignment, and mismatches between your listing and your pitch materials do affect matching quality.
alexdrenea-msMicrosoft
Hi Kavitha,
Yes, the guidance right now is to move towards private offers since they are much more flexible, have more features and are much easier to manage / scale.
To answer your questions, specifically:1. The only case where private plans are still used is when you absolutely do not want to show any kind of public presence / offer on the Marketplace. As you know, private offers are built on top of live, public plans - so if that is not an option for your org, then private plans remains the only vehicle to transact,
2. There are no issues in using both private plans and private offers on the same offer at the same time across different customers. The only point I would highlight is renewals - When issuing a private offer a new planId is created behind the scenes so a customer that is already subscribed to the offer via private plan will have to resubscribe to the private offer at renewal as you can't auto-renew in a different plan.
3. No changes at all in reporting, billing, revenue, etc...
The last thing that I'd like to highlight are two the best features available only on private offers that might bring a significant benefit:
1. Renewals done though private offers are eligible for a 50% agency fee discount -> Agency fee discount for renewals - Marketplace publisher | Microsoft Learn
2. Ability to create flexible billing schedules (milestone based) as part of private offers -> Creating flexible schedules in a private offer - Marketplace publisher | Microsoft Learn
Hope this helps.
Alex
