AI agent marketplaces take 3% to 25%. OpenAI won't say its cut.

Where you list an AI agent decides what you keep, and the storefronts have split into three price tiers. Microsoft and Google now take 3% of a sale on their cloud marketplaces. Salesforce takes 15% to 25% on AgentExchange. Apple and Google Play, the stores that trained everyone to expect a 30% tax, are the expensive option almost nobody building agents uses. And the storefront with the largest consumer audience, OpenAI's ChatGPT, is the one platform that still will not publish a take rate at all.

For anyone building an agent to sell, that spread matters more than the model you wrap. A 3% fee and a 25% fee on the same $50,000 of sales is the difference between keeping $48,500 and keeping $37,500. Here is what each store actually charges, where the number is real, and where it is a placeholder.

Microsoft and Google raced each other to 3%

Microsoft charges a 3% store service fee on transactions through Microsoft Marketplace, deducted at payout. That number is not an accident. Microsoft cut the fee from 20% to 3% in 2021 as a public jab at Apple and Google, and it has held since.

Google Cloud Marketplace matches it. The take is 3% on standard public offers, sliding to 2% on private deals between $1M and $10M, and 1.5% above that and on renewals. Two of the largest cloud vendors have decided the listing fee is the wrong place to make money on agents. Where they do make it is the part builders miss, and I come back to it below.

Salesforce still charges like an app store

Salesforce rebranded AppExchange as AgentExchange in 2026 and kept the old economics. ISVforce partners hand over 15% of net subscription revenue; OEM partners pay 25%, negotiable. Free listings pay nothing.

For a builder, 15% is five times the hyperscaler rate. What it buys is access to Salesforce's installed base of enterprise buyers, and that is the whole trade. Whether the audience is worth the cut depends on one question: does your agent need to sit inside a CRM the customer already pays for. If it does, 15% is the toll. If it does not, you are handing Salesforce a fifth of your revenue for a shelf you did not need.

The 30% baseline is finally cracking

Apple and Google Play set the reference point everyone else is priced against: 30% standard, and 15% for developers under $1M a year through their small business programs. Almost nobody sells a standalone AI agent through a phone app store, but the number still frames how a 3% marketplace reads.

It is also moving. Google Play is cutting its standard rate to 20% and subscriptions to 10% in the US, UK and EEA from June 30, 2026, under its settlement with Epic. The 30% era that made 3% look like a gift is ending on its own.

The biggest audience won't quote a price

OpenAI runs the storefront with the most reach, and it is the one you cannot price around. The GPT Store pays creators from a pooled share of subscription revenue allocated by engagement, with no published rate per use. The newer Apps SDK routes digital purchases through the developer's own checkout for now, and OpenAI's own documentation lists in-app monetization for digital goods, and the take on its Agentic Commerce Protocol, as still to come.

So a builder can model Microsoft to the basis point and cannot answer the simplest question about ChatGPT: if someone buys my agent here, what does OpenAI keep. Today the honest answer is that nobody outside OpenAI knows.

That structure is worth sitting with. Pooled, engagement-weighted payouts are the same shape that paid $1M across 10,000 creators in earlier AI earn programs: the total gets disclosed after the fact, your slice is not a number you set going in. It is a revenue share you take on faith.

What the low fee hides: the compute bill

The 3% marketplaces are not being generous. They are loss-leading on the listing to sell you the thing underneath. An agent runs on inference, and inference runs on the same vendor's cloud. Microsoft and Google can afford a 3% storefront because the agent you sell burns Azure or Google Cloud compute on every call, metered on a separate line that grows with your success.

For a builder, the number that matters is the marketplace percentage plus the compute your agent consumes. On the cheap stores, that second number is the one that scales with usage, and it lands on you, not the buyer. The rails that pay agents work the same way: the cut you can see is rarely the whole cost of being there.

If you would rather sell your time than a product, the freelance market prices AI work on a different curve entirely, with its own take rates and its own ceiling.

What to watch

Two numbers decide the next year. The first is whatever OpenAI finally publishes as its take on ChatGPT agent sales. Until it does, the largest audience carries the largest pricing risk, and "we'll tell you later" is a term you are already agreeing to. The second is where Google Play's forced cut to 20% pushes the rest of the field. If the phone stores drift toward the cloud marketplaces, the 3% floor becomes the market, and the platforms go back to earning the way they always meant to: on the compute, not the sale.

Sources

• Microsoft Marketplace transact capabilities, Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft to drop commercial marketplace fees to 3% from 20%, GeekWire
• Pricing models for AI agents, Google Cloud Marketplace docs
• AgentExchange ISV partner program FAQ, Salesforce Help
• App Store Small Business Program, Apple Developer
• App Store fees explained 2026, Week One Labs
• Monetization, OpenAI Apps SDK docs

This is not financial advice.