The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for persisting application state. Through decoupling an application host from an instance store, the application host can be used with many different persistence stores and persistence administration tools. Further, a given persistence store can be used with many different application hosts and application host extensions. Accordingly, applications can benefit from periodically persisting work to any of a variety of instance stores even if the applications are changed or are not natively configured for use with a particular instance store. Using persistence providers an application host can also more easily coordinate the persisted state with runtime state to ensure that a consistent checkpoint is created. Persistence providers can also be used to compensate for application host extensions and persistence administration tools that add coordination requirements that cannot be predicted at the time that the application is originally developed.