TL;DR: Solo founder, 6 months in, zero paying customers, competing with VC-funded players. Quit or push harder?

6 months into a docs platform. Think Mintlify/GitBook, but without Git, YAML, or deploys. Notion-like editor, live site in 5 mins, auto-generated llms.txt for AI discoverability.

Product works. I use it daily. Handful of free signups. Zero paying customers.

My real problem: no customers = no feedback. I can't tell if:

1. Product is good, I just suck at marketing

2. Product is fine but there's no market for another docs tool

3. I picked the wrong wedge (Mintlify $25M, GitBook $25M — category is real)

I'm an engineer. Never marketed anything. SEO is 6-12 months out and I'm not sure I have that runway emotionally.

What I need:

1. How do you get feedback when you have no users? I'd take 10 brutal critiques over 10 signups.

2. Solo founders who beat well-funded competitors — how did you earn trust when the alternative was a Series B company?

Happy to share the product with anyone curious — just DM me. Roast it. I can take it.

Hey r/node I thought I’d do a follow up to my last thread complaining about redocly charging $3600 a year for search and was given some incredible suggestions on alternatives, and also some mediocre suggestions that charge $200-400 a month for overriding CSS (this isn’t a joke).

I’ve spent the last few days trying them all out and I decided to write out the thread I wish existed when evaluating different platforms.

• OpenAPI-Docs in Docusaurues Open Sourced | CSS Price $0 | Search Price $0

• Scalar Open-Sourced | CSS Price $0 | Search Price $0

• Redoc in Docusuaurus Open-Sourced | CSS Price $0 | Search $0 (with typesense)

• Archbee Closed-Sourced | CSS Price $200 | Search $0 | No API Playground

• Readme Closed-Sourced Free | CSS Price $400/mo | Search Price $0

• Mintlify Closed-Sourced Free | CSS Price $400/mo | Search Price $0

OpenAPI-Docs in Docusaurues

Good: Kind of incredible that this small relatively unknown open source project was able to ship something on par if not better than redoc.
Bad: Needs more polish, also would be nice to have the spec decoupled from this package so I could add other UIs.

Scalar

Good: Well thought out UI (I love how the sidebar auto scrolls the page). Easy to change up the look and feel with a handful of variables. API testing feels more fun and less daunting than others
Bad: Relatively new project and I imagine it will take some time for it to not be so rough around the edges (i.e there’s a callout that says “authentication coming soon” on my published docs 😵)

Redocusaurus

Good: This is like redoc ++ Night mode via Docusaurus + you can add typesense search
Bad: Lacks a certain level of polish I’d expect would certainly require a few hours to days of work to be production ready in my eyes.

Archbee

Bad: Seems like api references were an afterthought added on to their documentation platform. UX seems very geared towards mobile first with putting a whole api testing suite in one single column is hard to consume. Sidebar ellipsis endpoints… $200/mo custom CSS

Readme

Good: Robust feature packed platform. Design is relatively nice.

Bad: Docs themselves break out each endpoint into a separate page, which might visually look cleaner but in practice seems like a whole lot of extra clicking to access things rather than just using a keyboard command F. There’s quite a steep learning curve to get up and running with readme, which is a shame because overall I think it’s a pretty good platform. It took me longer than I care to admit to publishing a simple pet store. $400/mo for CSS

Mintlify

Good: This is like if readme and gitbook had a baby. Nice UI, better testing interface than most of the others.

Bad: Similar feedback to readme about breaking things up to individual pages. I constantly see the folks at Vercel shouting this platform out so I had pretty high expectations going into it, but I just don’t get how they can justify the pricing (in its current form) when they’ve essentially just added git sync and some basic testing to a trendy tailwind template. All this being said it is significantly better than some of the other stuff that's out there. $400/mo for CSS

Conclusion

For my situation there’s clearly one large standout which is Scalar. Despite being rough around the edges it’s clearly going in the right direction. Huge upgrade from Redoc and doesn’t charge $400/mo for search || CSS.

I probably won’t find time to switch over to Scalar for another week or two so if anyone has anything else they’d like me to add to the list to test out would be happy to do so :)

I need to start building out my documentation for my SaaS imminent launch and I just realized there are a ton of documentation options.

I wanted to know what people are using and why. I would prefer something free and open source (MIT and GPL are fine).