If you’re here, you’re likely evaluating Frappe products for a prospect or have already resold / implemented them for your customers. You like our products and are thinking about building a business vertical with Frappe products. Great! You’ve reached the right place.

This guide contains everything you need to know about Frappe Partnerships, what are the benefits, rationale, and next steps to help you navigate the journey after becoming a Frappe Partner.

Frappe’s business model

Frappe’s business model has evolved over the years from a SaaS + services-led business model to hosting. As on today, Frappe Cloud is the primary revenue driver for Frappe.

Frappe Cloud is a specialised hosting platform for Frappe Apps that simplifies hosting for small businesses, large enterprises and partners. It comes with the benefits of multi-tenancy and managed hosting. Frappe Cloud simplifies installs, upgrades, backups, scalability and much more with a user friendly UI that achieves everything with a few clicks.

Frappe Cloud allows partners to focus on solving core business problems for their customers and leave the DevOps to Frappe. With Frappe Cloud, we not only aim to provide a world-class hosting experience but also offer application-level product warranties to end-customers. Which is why most of the Partners who join Frappe Partnership are already hosting Frappe products on Frappe Cloud.

Frappe’s business model can be summarised simply as:

“We create excellent products and developer tools, all 100% open source. You only pay for hosting on Frappe Cloud, through which Frappe aims to provide a reliable, scalable and secure hosting, and provide product support.”

Role of partners

If you’ve already read about Frappe’s business model, one thing should be clear to the readers. Frappe does not compete with our partners. Partners are central to the adoption and success of Frappe products. Partners are the reason for customers to adopt Frappe products. As on today, ~70% of Frappe Cloud revenue is serviced via Partners.

Here is the role Frappe Partners play:

• End-to-end Frappe products implementations
• New feature development and customisations
• L1 Product support
• Annual Maintenance Cost through renewals
• Contributing apps to the Frappe marketplace

Here is the role Frappe plays:

• Build excellent FOSS products
• Frappe Cloud Hosting
• L1 Product warranty
• Trainings through Frappe School

Frappe services complement our partners beautifully. The relationship is balanced and mutually beneficial — Frappe supports the partner’s growth as much as vice versa.

Profile of existing Frappe partners

The first type of partner profile we attracted are companies that have experience implementing Frappe products. This is because all our products are open-source and that does not gate-keep anyone from implementing them. Some of our old partners became authorised partners after as high as 30+ ERPNext implementations.

The second type of partners we attract are software development companies that start off with custom software development for end customers, and eventually stumble upon Frappe products and choose them over building apps from scratch. These partners typically have strong development capabilities.

The third category of partners we attract are experienced companies that have already built strong businesses with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, WordPress, Odoo and many more. These partners are strong in functional and consulting capabilities. They like the scalability and ease-of implementations for Frappe products and add Frappe to their portfolio.

Conclusion

To sum up, Partners are not just an enabler for the growth of the Frappe ecosystem, they’re a driving force. Partners play a key role in helping customers adopt Frappe products. Frappe partnership program enables us to discover, nurture and empower Frappe partners in the journey of mutual growth.