As ServiceTitan continues on its mission to build the Operating System that powers the Trades, we remain focused on ensuring that our customers have the best end-to-end solution they need to run and grow their businesses.
Last September, we announced our App Marketplace Certification program. This program was developed after we observed a desire from many partners to integrate with our platform, and a matching desire from our customers looking for extensions to our solutions. It was clear we needed a coherent strategy for extensions that were secure and robust.
Building a marketplace isn't uncharted territory for the technology industry. We have seen what works and what doesn’t for other industries. At the same time we created an ecosystem purpose-built for the trades. Now, after talking with customers and partners to understand their needs and expectations, we’ve come up with a core philosophy behind our Marketplace approach
ServiceTitan Ecosystem Philosophy
Customers rely on ServiceTitan to power their mission-critical operations. As a result, customers have asked us to make sure our Marketplace is secure, performant, and predictable.
We recognize this is even more important in a world of rapid AI adoption, where a single integration can expose contractors’data, as well as their customers’ data, generating an intense load that slows their operations during peak hours, or makes mass unauthorized changes to their operations.
A completely unrestricted marketplace would be unsecure. A fully restricted marketplace would be of limited value. Which is why we’ve taken a different approach — a Certified Marketplace.
Requirements to be certified
To join ServiceTitan Certified Marketplace we have strict requirements for partners:
Security
Our customers’ data belongs to our customers, and we have a responsibility to protect it.
Apps must be secure. They cannot unintentionally or nefariously siphon off sensitive data including (but not limited to): end-customer data, payment details, employee records, business financials, etc., overwrite or delete data, or train models that can later be used to compete with our customers’ business.
If there is a bug in an app, or a bad actor injects code into an app, it can cripple our customers’ operations, inflict tremendous financial and operational pain on them, require significant effort on their and our part to restore operations, and cause significant reputational damage to the Marketplace resulting in diminished willingness from customers to adopt apps from all partners.
Performance
Apps must be performant. They cannot generate excessive or unnecessary load on our infrastructure that could impact our customers’ operations.
Predictability
An app’s scope must be clear and reasonably defined. ServiceTitan and its customers must know what data an app accesses, what workflows it supports, what outputs it generates, what actions it takes, and where its boundaries start and stop.
Data Transparency
If partners are accessing data through the ServiceTitan API, they must also write back data to ServiceTitan, so that we can maintain the end-to-end experience for customers.
Revenue Share
Building mission-critical infrastructure requires significant investment. Providing technical assistance and go-to-market support to partners requires investment. Partners must share in these costs through reasonable economic arrangements that are comparable to other industries. This allows us to continue to invest in further improving the Marketplace to benefit all stakeholders.
Mutual Benefit
A marketplace works only if it benefits all parties: customers, vendors, and ServiceTitan. Vendors build valuable solutions for contractors and extend the value of ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan builds the infrastructure, offers technical assistance, and go-to-market support. Both vendors and ServiceTitan must share in these costs.
ServiceTitan operating approach
For our part, ServiceTitan is committed to the following:
Maintain a high-quality ecosystem:
Our certification program investments are geared towards ensuring that the ecosystem only certifies partners of repute and who adhere to the requirements above.
Fairness
It’s critical that the rules of our App Certification program are applied fairly and consistently. That’s why we created specific tiers of certification, and clear rules around supported integration patterns.This sets clear expectations for every partner, while giving them full visibility into our Marketplace policies
Competitive Offerings
While some software companies explicitly forbid competitive products from their marketplace, we offer several Marketplace partners that provide capabilities that compete with parts of ServiceTitan’s capabilities.We believe such offerings add value for our customers, and welcome those partners because of that value, as long as they’re not leveraging the partnership and our support to gradually displace additional parts of ServiceTitan.
A Note on Customer Apps
Customers can freely build their own apps in their own ServiceTitan instance, without certification.
Our Recent Progress:
We’re thrilled with the number of partners that see our approach and align with our philosophy of building responsible integrations. With our certification capacity now fully in place, partners can expect a faster, more transparent process. We know speed matters, and we're committed to moving more partners through the pipeline efficiently. We've already certified 14 partners across accounting, payroll, point-of-sale, e-commerce, CSR, and more, with additional certifications underway. This includes a number of partners we’ve certified over the past two weeks, and are actively in the process of certifying more over the next few days.
Clarifying our approach to Capacity APIs
One of the core tenets of our philosophy is ensuring that we maintain end-to-end workflow coherence for customers even if they adopt partner solutions for portions of their workflow. One concrete example of the end-to-end workflow coherence principles in action is Adaptive Capacity (AdCap) - our newest capacity model. We want to ensure that the effort customers put into tuning their adaptive capacity logic is leverageable across the workflow.
AdCap is available to customers to build custom applications. And is also available to certified partners who need access to it for the scopes they operate in. You can find more details about it here.
Next steps
Over the coming weeks and months, we will be onboarding more partners into the program. Our ultimate goal is to build a curated and durable ecosystem where partners and customers can rely on a high bar of quality and trust.
