Why Your B2B SaaS Marketplace Isn’t Scaling (and What to Do About It)

In the early days of B2B SaaS marketplaces, success was often measured by a major metric: how many certified partners you could recruit. Salesforce mastered the model. So did Atlassian. They built developer communities, hosted app showcases, and cultivated entire ecosystems around their platforms. The logic was simple - if you wanted to scale your marketplace, you needed more builders.

But today, that logic is showing its age.

Most platforms can’t, and frankly, shouldn’t, try to recreate the Salesforce playbook. The traditional approach of recruit, certify, support, and repeat is proving to be costly, hard to scale, and increasingly misaligned with how modern buyers expect to engage with technology.

Meanwhile, demand for marketplace experiences is growing fast. A recent study found that 73 out of the top 100 SaaS companies already offer a native in-app marketplace, and 86 of them also operate a public-facing marketplace site to attract partners and showcase integrations. The appetite is there. But the execution is where most platforms fall short.

A shift is underway. The next generation of B2B marketplace development isn’t about onboarding more developers. It’s about extensibility - creating marketplaces where anyone, from internal teams to partners and even business users, can safely create, customize, and share  solutions at scale.

Why Traditional B2B SaaS Marketplaces Hit a Wall

There’s no question that marketplaces still offer huge strategic value. According to Gartner, nearly half of tech providers gaining market share are active on purpose-specific or third-party marketplaces. For B2B platforms, they promise faster time to value, stickier customer relationships, and stronger ecosystem gravity.

But many of these initiatives stall shortly after launch. The main reason is that most marketplaces rely on a narrow model - one that assumes a small, certified group of partners will do all the building. These partners are expensive to onboard, slow to scale, and difficult to retain without the promise of distribution and monetization. They also tend to require ongoing support: technical hand-holding, listing approvals, versioning coordination, and more.

As a result, growth becomes constrained by internal bandwidth and developer bottlenecks. Instead of evolving based on user needs, the marketplace grows in the direction of what the vendor can manage.

And that’s only part of the challenge. Most platforms also run into a set of recurring structural pain points:

• API support and stability becomes an ongoing cost. Any change risks breaking partner-built apps. Developer trust weakens, and internal product velocity slows down.
  
• Security and compliance risks increase with every third-party integration. Even with review workflows, platforms like Slack and Salesforce had to invest heavily in permission systems and admin controls to preserve trust.
  
• Early-stage marketplaces struggle with a cold-start problem - they need developers before they have active users, and vice versa. It’s why monday.com launched its developer program with a $180K competition: to spark momentum from both sides of the ecosystem.
  
• Discoverability breaks down when marketplaces grow too open without structure. Too many duplicative or low-quality apps create noise, reducing trust and user engagement.
  
• Internal teams are under-leveraged. Customer success managers and implementation leads often have a deep understanding of customer needs, but without the tools to act on that insight, their requests are redirected to dev teams or pushed down the backlog.
  
• Verticalization becomes a scalability trap. Customers want solutions tailored to their industry. Whether in healthcare, fintech, logistics, or beyond, meeting those needs usually requires niche partners or dedicated builds, which don’t scale easily. Each vertical brings unique regulatory, localization, and integration challenges, making a one-size-fits-all approach impossible.
  

Put together, these issues lead to the same outcome: growth plateaus, and the marketplace risks becoming little more than a static plugin directory.

Your Users Want More Than a Plugin Gallery

Today’s B2B buyers aren’t looking for an endless scroll of app logos. They expect intelligent recommendations, preconfigured bundles, and role-specific workflows that fit their exact needs.

According to Gartner, 73% of B2B buyers now expect personalized, B2C-like marketplace experiences. That means discovery tools with vertical filters, pricing logic based on usage patterns, and context-aware flows that fit into their existing stack.

This level of complexity is especially pronounced in CRM, HR, legal, ERP, and marketing platforms - domains where workflows are nuanced, and data sensitivity is high. Simply offering a list of third-party integrations isn’t enough. Buyers expect marketplaces to meet them where they are.

From Certified to Democratized: The Real SaaS Marketplace Shift

A new model is emerging, one that favors flexibility over gatekeeping and composability over control.

In this model:

• You’re not just supporting apps - you’re supporting building tools to enable business users and partners to create their own apps.
  
• You’re not just onboarding developers - you’re empowering platform creators, from internal teams to implementation partners and business users.
  
• You’re not relying on hardcoded extensions - you’re offering secure, modular tools that allow anyone to build responsibly.
  
  

Extensibility is really about opening up space for creativity, without losing control. Instead of locking everything down or relying on a handful of partners, you give others the right tools and safe boundaries to build within. Think of your platform less like a gated system and more like a shared canvas. One where teams, partners, and even customers can create what they need, in a way that still aligns with your architecture, security, and product vision. That’s where real innovation happens - not at the edges of your roadmap, but in the hands of the people using your platform every day.

What In-App Marketplace Early Adopters Got Right

Some platforms are already embracing this shift, often quietly and incrementally.

• monday.com launched its marketplace with a developer challenge, not to reward legacy partners, but to attract a new generation of builders, including those with no-code backgrounds.
  
• Shopify has been opening internal tooling for merchants to customize workflows, signaling a move toward merchant-led extensibility rather than third-party dependency.
  
• ADP maintains a curated HR marketplace, but supports it with modular APIs and pre-vetted templates to let integrators build tailored flows with minimal lift.
  
• Atlassian, with over $4B in cumulative marketplace sales, has recently evolved its infrastructure and revenue share to better support lightweight, composable add-ons, not just full-scale applications.
  

Each of these examples points to the same shift: marketplaces grow faster when platforms loosen their grip and empower others to build.

The Role of Extensibility in B2B Marketplace Development

This shift has far-reaching implications for how platforms design and operate their marketplaces. Rather than obsess over app volume or partner headcount, leading platforms are focusing on new levers:

• Composability: Can internal and external teams use your APIs, templates, and builder tools to solve problems, without needing full-stack engineering?
  
• Governance at scale: Can you enforce security, governance, and performance standards without becoming a bottleneck?
  
• Time-to-value: Can marketplace offerings be launched in days or weeks, not quarters?
  

All of this depends on your extensibility architecture. The more composable and accessible your platform is, the easier it becomes to support marketplace growth that’s both sustainable and strategic.

The future of B2B marketplaces isn’t defined by how many apps you can list. It’s defined by how many people you can empower to create and share. At the foundation is trust - security, interoperability, and stability. Layered on top is composability - the modular architecture that makes extensions possible. And finally, there’s the ecosystem itself: an expanding network of builders, from creating users to partners, creating value at the edges of your platform.

Final Thought: It’s Not About More Apps. It’s About More Creators.

For B2B platform leaders, the question is no longer whether to build a marketplace. That debate is over. The real question is whether your marketplace can scale - not just in size, but in value.

Listing more apps or onboarding more partners won’t get you there. The shift that matters is internal: rethinking the marketplace as a product that’s extensible by design. One that invites others to build, adapt, and innovate without compromising control or burning through roadmap resources.

Extensibility enables marketplaces to evolve from static catalogs into living ecosystems. It creates space for vertical depth, role-based customization, and true agility across segments and geographies.

If the last decade of SaaS was about product-led growth, the next decade will be about extensibility-led growth. And the companies that lead will be the ones that make it easy for others to build on what they’ve built.