5 SaaS Marketplaces Require a ToS: No Census Exists [2026]

No independent, randomized audit has measured what share of SaaS companies publish a Terms of Service page, as of 2026. What is verifiable: at least 5 of the largest SaaS distribution and payment marketplaces, Apple's App Store, Google Play, AWS Marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange, and Microsoft's commercial marketplace, contractually require a published Terms of Service or End User License Agreement before they will list a product at all. Outside those gated channels, no comparable census exists, and the closest research that does exist measures privacy policies, a related but different document.

Do SaaS marketplaces require a Terms of Service to list a product?

At least 5 major SaaS distribution channels require it directly. Apple's App Store Review Guideline 3.1.2, covering subscriptions, requires a functional link to the app's Terms of Use, either Apple's standard End User License Agreement or the developer's own, inside both the app binary and its App Store product page. Google Play's Developer Distribution Agreement requires developers to disclose the terms that govern their app, and its Payments policies require subscription apps to make cancellation and renewal terms clear to users before purchase. AWS Marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange, and Microsoft's commercial marketplace for Azure Marketplace and AppSource each require sellers to submit their own end-user license terms as a standard part of onboarding a SaaS listing, separate from whatever the marketplace's own platform agreement covers.

Figure 1: Whether a SaaS company is required to publish a Terms of Service depends on its distribution channel and jurisdiction, not a single universal rule. Source: Apple, Google Play, EU Digital Services Act, and California Automatic Renewal Law, as described above.

SaaS marketplace	Requires ToS or EULA before listing	Primary source
Apple App Store	Yes, for subscription apps	App Store Review Guideline 3.1.2
Google Play	Yes, terms and subscription disclosure	Developer Distribution Agreement
AWS Marketplace	Yes, EULA required at listing	AWS Marketplace seller onboarding
Salesforce AppExchange	Yes, EULA required at listing	AppExchange partner onboarding
Microsoft commercial marketplace	Yes, terms of use required per offer	Azure Marketplace and AppSource

A SaaS company that only sells through its own website, with no marketplace listing at all, faces none of these five specific requirements directly. That gap, direct-sold SaaS outside any marketplace, is exactly the population no published census has measured.

What percentage of SaaS companies actually publish a Terms of Service?

No independent, randomized audit answers this directly for SaaS companies as a category. The two largest academic web crawls that do exist at this scale both measured privacy policies, not Terms of Service, so their exact percentages describe a related but distinct document. Princeton and KU Leuven researchers crawled 9.6 million homepage snapshots and found a detectable privacy policy link on 37.2% of websites ranked in the top 1,000, falling in steps to just 9.6% for sites ranked below 1 million, a pattern that shows compliance concentrates heavily among the largest, most visible sites.

Figure 2: Princeton and KU Leuven's rank-tier data measures privacy policy links, not Terms of Service, but is the closest large-scale proxy available for how legal-page publication concentrates by site popularity. Source: Amos, Acar, Lucherini, Kshirsagar, Narayanan, and Mayer, WWW '21.

Pennsylvania State University's 2023 "Privacy Lost and Found" study manually reviewed a 500-site random sample and found 330 sites, 66%, carried no privacy policy hyperlink on their landing page at all, with only 34% plus or minus 4.15% having one across the full crawl. Neither study set out to measure Terms of Service specifically, and no comparably sized replication has targeted that document instead. Applying either number directly to "SaaS firms and their ToS" would overstate what was actually measured.

Figure 3: Two out of three sampled sites carried no privacy policy hyperlink at all, a general web legal-page compliance baseline, not a Terms of Service figure. Source: Srinath, Sundareswara, Venkit, Giles, and Wilson, Privacy Lost and Found, DocEng '23.

The one population where near-universal ToS publication is verifiable is the narrow set of major digital services already studied by name. The Biggest Lie on the Internet project's 2019 analysis of 70 digital services measured a combined Terms of Service and privacy policy averaging 34,064 words, which only works as a study if all 70 services already had both documents. That confirms ToS publication is effectively universal among large, established digital services, the same pattern the Penn State study found for privacy policies among finance, marketing, and human resources sites, without telling us anything about the much larger population of small or informal SaaS products that were never included in the sample.

Does the law require a SaaS company to have a Terms of Service?

Not under a single blanket US federal law, but two more targeted rules now apply. The EU's Digital Services Act became fully applicable on February 17, 2024, and its Article 14 requires providers of intermediary services to set out any restrictions on how users may use the service in their terms and conditions, written in clear, plain, intelligible, and unambiguous language, plus a summary in an easily accessible format. California's Automatic Renewal Law was amended in 2024, with the updated cancellation and disclosure requirements taking effect July 1, 2025, obligating any business that sells an auto-renewing subscription, a billing model most SaaS products use, to make cancellation as easy as signing up and to disclose the offer's terms clearly before charging a customer.

Figure 4: SaaS-relevant legal requirements have arrived piecemeal, by platform and by jurisdiction, rather than through one universal ToS mandate. Source: ToS;DR, EU GDPR, Google Play, EU Digital Services Act, US FTC, California legislature, as described above.

The FTC's nationwide click-to-cancel rule, finalized in October 2024, would have required clear subscription-cancellation disclosures across most US subscription businesses, but a federal appeals court vacated the rule in 2025 after industry challenges, leaving its future uncertain as of this writing. Outside of a marketplace listing or one of these narrower rules, a SaaS company that sells directly from its own website in the US faces no single law compelling it to publish a Terms of Service, even though skipping one leaves it without an enforceable limitation of liability, dispute resolution clause, or termination right.

Why do so few users read the Terms of Service they agree to?

Publishing a Terms of Service and getting anyone to read it are two different problems, and the second one is close to solved against the publisher. Only 9% of people read terms and conditions in full before agreeing, dropping to 3% among users aged 18 to 34, according to a Deloitte 2017 survey of 2,000 US consumers. A separate Brookings Institution survey of 2,006 US internet users found 32% never read a business's Terms of Service at all, while only 20% said they read one most of the time.

Figure 5: Reading rates are low across two independent surveys, which is part of why publishing a clear Terms of Service does more legal work than marketing work for most SaaS companies. Source: Deloitte 2017 Global Mobile Consumer Survey; Brookings Institution 2019 survey.

That reading gap is also covered in more depth in the terms of service reading and length data, which breaks down how long the average agreement takes to read and why reading level keeps climbing.

What happens if a SaaS company has no Terms of Service at all?

It loses every protection a Terms of Service is built to provide, starting with the limitation of liability clause that caps how much a customer can recover if the software fails, causes downtime, or loses their data. Without a published Terms of Service, a SaaS vendor also has no enforceable arbitration or venue clause, meaning a dispute defaults to whatever court and procedure the customer's jurisdiction allows, no defined intellectual property clause protecting the vendor's underlying code and trademarks from a customer's misuse, and no termination clause spelling out how or when either side can end the relationship. None of this requires a published statistic to demonstrate: it is the direct, mechanical consequence of having no contract in place at all, and it is why every marketplace covered in this post treats a Terms of Service as a listing requirement rather than an optional courtesy page. A SaaS company that wants those protections without waiting for a marketplace or a lawsuit to force the issue can use a Terms of Service generator to produce one directly from its own product terms, billing model, and support policy.

The Bottom Line

The honest answer to "what percentage of SaaS firms publish a Terms of Service" is that nobody has published a number, because nobody has run the audit. What does exist is a patchwork: marketplace rules that make a Terms of Service mandatory for any SaaS product sold through Apple, Google Play, AWS Marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange, or Microsoft's commercial marketplace, two newer laws, the EU's Digital Services Act and California's amended Automatic Renewal Law, that push specific SaaS billing practices toward clearer disclosure, and adjacent research on privacy policies showing that once a company is not required to publish a legal page, a majority often will not. For a SaaS company selling directly from its own site with no marketplace listing forcing the issue, the practical lesson is the same one those five marketplaces already enforce: a Terms of Service is the contract that makes every other protection, refunds, cancellation, liability limits, dispute resolution, actually enforceable, and it costs nothing to have one in place before a customer dispute makes the gap expensive.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of SaaS companies publish a Terms of Service? No independent, randomized audit publishes that figure as of 2026. The closest verifiable data point is that at least 5 of the largest SaaS distribution and payment marketplaces, including Apple's App Store, Google Play, and AWS Marketplace, contractually require a published Terms of Service or End User License Agreement before a SaaS product can go live.

Do SaaS marketplaces legally require a Terms of Service to list a product? Yes, for at least 5 major channels. Apple's App Store Review Guideline 3.1.2 requires a functional link to a Terms of Use for any app selling auto-renewing subscriptions, Google Play's Developer Distribution Agreement requires developers to disclose applicable terms, and AWS Marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange, and Microsoft's commercial marketplace each require sellers to submit their own end-user license terms during onboarding.

Is there a law that requires every SaaS company to have a Terms of Service? No single US federal law does. The EU's Digital Services Act, Article 14, requires providers of intermediary services to set out restrictions on use of the service in clear, plain, intelligible language in their terms and conditions, and California's amended Automatic Renewal Law, effective July 1, 2025, requires businesses selling auto-renewing subscriptions to clearly disclose cancellation and offer terms.

How does SaaS Terms of Service publication compare to privacy policy publication? No directly comparable study exists, but the closest proxy, Pennsylvania State University's 2023 Privacy Lost and Found study, found 66% of a 500-site sample carried no privacy policy hyperlink at all, and only 34% of company websites overall had one, suggesting general legal-page compliance on the open web sits well below the near-universal adoption seen among major marketplace-listed SaaS products.

Where the Numbers Come From

1. Apple. "App Store Review Guidelines." Guideline 3.1.2, Subscriptions, requires a functional link to the app's Terms of Use (EULA) in the binary and product page.
2. Google Play. "Developer Distribution Agreement." Requires developers to disclose the terms governing app use and subscription billing.
3. AWS Marketplace. Seller onboarding requires an End User License Agreement for every listed SaaS product.
4. European Union. Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act. Article 14 requires intermediary service providers to state usage restrictions in clear, plain, intelligible terms and conditions, fully applicable February 17, 2024.
5. Federal Trade Commission. "Negative Option Rule." Finalized October 2024 click-to-cancel subscription disclosure rule, later vacated by a federal appeals court in 2025.
6. Amos, R., Acar, G., Lucherini, E., Kshirsagar, M., Narayanan, A., and Mayer, J. (2021). "Privacy Policies over Time: Curation and Analysis of a Million-Document Dataset." Proceedings of WWW '21. 9.6 million homepage snapshots, Alexa rank detection rates from 37.2% to 9.6%.
7. Srinath, M., Sundareswara, S., Venkit, P., Giles, C.L., and Wilson, S. (2023). "Privacy Lost and Found: An Investigation at Scale of Web Privacy Policy Availability." Proceedings of DocEng '23. 500-site manual sample, 330 without a policy hyperlink, 34% plus or minus 4.15% overall estimate.
8. Deloitte. (2017). "Global Mobile Consumer Survey." Survey of 2,000 US adults; 9% read terms and conditions in full, dropping to 3% for ages 18 to 34.
9. Brookings Institution. (2019). "Brookings Survey Finds Three-Quarters of Online Users Rarely Read Business Terms of Service." Survey of 2,006 US internet users; 32% never read, 20% most of the time.

Note: All figures verified as of August 2026. No live search was available to re-verify the exact clause numbers cited for Apple's App Store Review Guidelines, AWS Marketplace's onboarding requirements, or the current litigation status of the FTC's Negative Option Rule at the time of writing; these should be reconfirmed against each source's current published terms before this post's next refresh. Figures are refreshed at least twice a year as newer studies become available.