For your own instance or a close partner: integrate through the API

• The instance is yours, or a close partner’s who accepts an uncertified update set.
• Low volume and simple objects.
• Nobody needs a certified app, now or soon.

• No Store app means no Build Program membership. Any custom tables your update set adds count against the instance owner’s custom-table allowance, unless ServiceNow’s Custom Table Guide exempts them.
• If a partner calls your API from their own flows, those calls are IntegrationHub transactions: ServiceNow defines one as “any outbound call originating from Integration Hub, Flow Designer, Remote Tables, or Orchestration”.
• Your product needs an integration user in each instance. Check the owner’s licensing rules for integration users with their ServiceNow team.

• Credentials for each instance: its address and its authentication setup.
• An agreed way in for your data. ServiceNow’s integration guidance calls the Import Set API “the recommended approach” and says to “Treat direct table writes as a last resort for process interactions and never use them for data imports.”
• Anything the integration needs inside the instance, such as a role or import tables, packaged as an update set the owner reviews.

Plan on roughly 2–4 weeks from the start of design to a working integration. There is no certification step, and no certification documents.

Weeks come from our own projects.

• An update set nobody certified, installed by hand in each instance.
• Direct table writes with no staging layer: no transform map to absorb payload changes, no import log, and no way to reprocess failed records.
• Nothing to show a security reviewer who asks for a certified app.

• Each instance’s upgrade can break your calls, so test against its release cycle.
• When customers beyond your close partners want it, move to the minimum certifiable Store app: the Store is the certified way in.

• Which credentials you hold for their instance, and how you store them.
• What the integration user can do.