Announcing the Helm Marketplace: The World's First End-to-End Monetization Platform for Kubernetes Applications
Today marks a pivotal moment in the cloud-native ecosystem. We're proud to introduce the CNAP Helm Marketplace—the world's first comprehensive platform that transforms any Helm chart into a profitable SaaS offering with zero DevOps overhead for your customers.
Picture this: You're a talented developer who's built an incredible application. It's solving real problems, your users love it, and you know there's a market willing to pay for it. But here's the catch—turning that brilliant code into a sustainable business? That's where the dream hits the wall of infrastructure complexity.
Until today, developers faced an impossible choice: either spend months building custom billing systems, multi-tenant infrastructure, and deployment pipelines, or watch their innovations gather dust while they focus on the operational overhead instead of the features that matter. This is especially painful for the new generation of creators who excel at building innovative applications but shouldn't need to become infrastructure experts to monetize them.
We're changing that forever.
Introducing the World's First End-to-End Helm Marketplace
The CNAP Helm Marketplace isn't just another application catalog—it's the infrastructure layer that makes the "App Store for enterprise software" finally possible. As developers ourselves, we've built what we always wished existed: a platform that handles everything except the code you're passionate about.
Think about it. Mobile app stores democratized software distribution by handling payments, discovery, and deployment. But enterprise software? We're still stuck in the dark ages of custom infrastructure, manual deployments, and vendor lock-in. Until now.
Here's what makes CNAP fundamentally different: we're not competing with AWS, Azure, or GCP—we're liberating you from having to choose just one. We enable you to build managed services that run anywhere: any cloud provider, bare metal, or hybrid infrastructure. Your customers get the freedom to run your software on their terms, in their jurisdiction, with their preferred infrastructure.
This isn't about building another platform that owns your customers. It's about giving you the infrastructure to own your destiny. When you deploy through CNAP, your customers get dedicated Kubernetes clusters with enterprise-grade isolation. They can run your software on their preferred infrastructure, in their jurisdiction, under their control.
How It Works: From Code to Revenue in Minutes
Imagine this workflow: You take your existing Helm chart, connect your Stripe account, set your pricing, and publish. That's it. No custom billing systems. No multi-tenant architecture to build. No customer deployment pipelines to maintain.
Your customers? They browse your application, configure their deployment, pay through integrated checkout, and get a fully managed service running in their preferred region. No kubectl commands. No YAML editing. No infrastructure headaches.
This is what "Package Once, Sell Everywhere" actually means in practice.
We've spent years building the infrastructure layer that handles everything you don't want to think about. Like Stripe revolutionized payments by making them bulletproof and reliable, CNAP's deployment system delivers enterprise-grade security, transparency, and centralized control with zero-DevOps complexity.
We didn't build this on experimental technology or proprietary lock-ins. The CNAP marketplace runs on battle-tested infrastructure: Kubernetes for orchestration, ArgoCD for GitOps deployments, and Stripe for payments. But we quickly learned that ArgoCD alone wasn't enough for the complex, multi-tenant workflows our platform demands—that's where Temporal workflows became essential to fill the gaps and ensure bulletproof reliability.
But here's what makes it revolutionary: we've orchestrated these tools into a seamless experience that abstracts away the complexity while preserving the power and flexibility that developers need. Just as customers can buy apps confidently on Stripe without worrying about payment failures, they can deploy your software on CNAP without breaking or downtime risks.
The moment you publish your Helm chart, it becomes a fully discoverable product. Every deployment follows a proven, reliable pipeline that just works. Both you and your customers get comprehensive visibility into deployment status, resource usage, and performance metrics.
This is the difference between building a product and building a business—we handle the business infrastructure so you can focus on the product innovation that matters.
Early Results That Speak for Themselves
Julian from o7studios captured it perfectly during his onboarding: he described CNAP as the "SaaS platform" that lets him offer his product without any infrastructure effort, so his team can focus their time purely on developing their product—the thing they're actually experts at. He spoke about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world—he just didn't know what to call something like that before. We love his description; it captures the essence immediately.
The excitement from our early community has been overwhelming. When we first started building the foundational technology that would become CNAP, developers immediately saw the potential. "I love the idea, is there a way to contribute?" was a common response, with hosting providers across different regions—from Germany and Turkey to Australia and the US—eager to join and offer their infrastructure.
One developer exploring the platform for selling self-hosted applications like mail servers told us: "This is a really interesting platform so I'm looking forward to getting something working." What particularly excited them was the ability to sell directly from their own website rather than being forced into a marketplace model.
The organic evolution of our platform tells the story best: what started as infrastructure for a gaming platform quickly revealed itself as something much bigger. As one community member put it, this looked like "an exciting project and definitely heading in the right direction for cloud networking!" The underlying primitives were simply too useful to limit to just one use case.
These aren't isolated success stories. They're the early indicators of a fundamental shift in how software gets distributed and monetized.
The Helm Marketplace is just the beginning. We're building toward a future where metered billing automatically tracks resource consumption, advanced deployment strategies support blue/green and canary releases, service mesh integration provides zero-trust security by default, and AI-powered optimization automatically scales and optimizes deployments.
But you don't need to wait for the future. Ready to transform your Helm charts into revenue-generating products? This is what democratized software distribution looks like in practice, and the revolution starts today.
Join the Movement
The barriers between great software and profitable business are crumbling. We're not just building a marketplace—we're creating a new category. CNAP's vision powers a managed services economy for emerging talent—enabling developers to deploy with confidence, monetize, and grow alongside the explosive rise of new innovations and applications in the AI creator wave.
This is your invitation to be part of something bigger. To turn your Helm charts into thriving SaaS businesses. To focus on the code you're passionate about while we handle the infrastructure you're not. Whether you're selling open-source projects or hosting customers on your own machines, CNAP enables developers to go to market faster than ever.
Get Started with Our Interactive Quickstart →
Includes introduction video and step-by-step guide to your first sale
The world's first end-to-end Helm marketplace is live and ready for your applications. The question isn't whether this will change how software gets distributed—it's whether you'll be leading that change or following it.
Questions? Join our Discord community or reach out to our team. We're here to help you succeed.
About CNAP: The Cloud Native Application Platform is the leading infrastructure for deploying, managing, and monetizing cloud applications. Built on modern cloud-native technologies, CNAP provides a seamless experience for both application developers and infrastructure providers. Learn more at cnap.tech.