Is SNS mandatory to determine 'subscribe-success' when verifying a customer subscription for Saas-based platform?

Question

When the customer is redirected to the Saas-based product landing page, they will have a x-amzn-marketplace-token that can be exchanged for the unique customer identiﬁer, customer AWS account Id, and corresponding product code. However, there are few places in the SaaS manual that state to not create any resources for the customer unless the 'subscribe-success' status is verified.

Is the exchange of the marketplace token enough to verify the 'subscribe-success' status or is confirming an SNS notification with 'subscribe-success' mandatory? I've looked around the documentation but did not find any verification, so I would appreciate any clarification.

Answer

AWS Marketplace recommends waiting until you receive the subscribe-success event before launching any resources. I'd wouldn't call it mandatory, but you would be taking on exposure to the cost of the resources you launched on your tenants behalf if their purchase does not complete.

You also need to be sure your SaaS application is able to handle a user arriving at your registration URL before the SNS notification arrives, particularly if that means their resources haven't been provisioned yet. I'd also give some thought to that user experience, and what it will cost for the resources provisioned for a tenant that does not complete their purchase, versus the time to value of a customer who is waiting on the registration URL for those resources after their purchase, from their perspective, is complete.

There is also a [discussion on success-status notification](https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-marketplace-user-guide-for-sellers/issues/30)s in the Marketplace User Guide Github.

Is SNS mandatory to determine 'subscribe-success' when verifying a customer subscription for Saas-based platform?

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