Hi all

like many startups, we're hosting our docs on Mintlify which also comes with their AI assistant that answers questions based on your docs, which is quite nice.

But the issue is that the $300 we pay for our Pro plan only include up to 250 AI assistant messages per month.

And we receive 50 messages a day (a number that's increasing) which requires to use their tier that's $633 / month (over 2x what we currently pay) - even if we don't use all messages every month.
-> And that's more than 40 cent per message (not even conversation or resolution) that answers questions on our public docs...

5k messages would be $1.5k a month, 50k messages >$10k.

And the responses are just okay-ish.

So I'm curious to know if anyone found a good alternative that integrates to my Mintlify docs, eventually also allows to answer based on additional documents.

So far I've seen:

- Kapa.ai which is what n8n uses, seems pretty accurate but the design isn't great and the pricing is even higher than Mintlify

- Lookio.app, I'll probably give a try to their widgets, seems good and way cheaper

- Chatbase.co -> I tried it 2 years ago, now it seems like they're way deeper into the agentic space and I'll have to check that again to see if it works well for this simpler use case

Any other alternative, I'm curious to hear!

And I'll probably report back once we test some of those options :)

We tried Mintlify for a few projects but always moved to self-hosted solution usually due to price. But it seems like it's a popular option.

My question: Would you find it useful to have a cheaper replacement that directly connects to your mintlify repo and hosts it on a fast CDN? No code changes required.

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).

I've been using Mintlify for a few months now on their Free tier and have been becoming increasingly frustrated with the ongoing changes being made to the web editor.

The main draws to the platform for me were:

• The ability to switch between a drag and drop visual editor and markdown editor on the fly

• The ability to manage and organize my repo files from the editor

• A clean presentation, both with the editor and resulting documentation

• Basically, a not-so-code-focused version of Docusaurus

That said, over the past three months or so, they've gone and made changes to the editor that have me wanting to migrate to something that better fits my usecase. The changes:

• Strongarming AI usage into the editor

• Removing the ability to manage and organize repo files from the editor

• Breaking features that require the ability to manage and organize repo files

  • Ex. You used to be able to copy an image's internal link from within a repo to put into an image module. Now only direct image upload from your computer is available, even if you already have the image in your repo

It really feels like by taking one step forward with AI, they're taking five steps back in manual usage.

That said, does anyone else here use Mintlify? And are there any alternatives that are worth checking out?

Documentation hosting is weirdly expensive. Mintlify, the current darling of dev docs, starts at $150/mo. For hosting markdown files. I built Vellocs as an alternative. Here's how they compare technically:

How Mintlify works:

• You add amint.json config to your repo

• Their system pulls your MDX, builds it, hosts it

• Nice visual editor, team features, versioning

• Closed source, proprietary build system

How Vellocs works:

• You connect your GitHub repo via OAuth

• We detect your docs folder (or Mintlify config and convert it)

• Build runs on Vercel's infrastructure

• Deployed to *.vellocs.me (free) or your custom domain (€2.99/mo)

• Your repo is the source of truth — no lock-in

Technical comparison:

Where Mintlify is technically superior:

• Incremental builds (Vellocs rebuilds everything)

• Visual WYSIWYG editor

• OpenAPI spec auto-generation

• Branch preview deployments

• More mature error handling

Where Vellocs is technically superior:

• Mintlify migration — auto-detects mint.json, rewrites to Vellocs config

• AI fix suggestions — build fails, AI reads logs, suggests code fixes

• Simpler architecture — it's just Next.js on Vercel, no magic

• GitHub App integration — single OAuth handles auth + repo access

• No build queue — deploys go directly to Vercel's infra

The real question:

Is Mintlify's polish worth 50x the price? For enterprises with compliance needs and dedicated support contracts — yes. For everyone else shipping docs for a side project or startup — probably not.

32k lines of TypeScript. 17 days of building. Runs on the same Vercel infra that hosts Next.js's own docs.

Free tier: *.vellocs.me subdomain
€2.99/mo: custom domain + in-depth analytics

I’m working on a lightweight alternative to GitBook/Mintlify for indie devs and API-first startups. Curious:

- Are you using GitBook, Mintlify or something else for your API documentation ?

- What do you think its broken or annoying in your current setup ?

- Would you pay for either a better tool or done-for-you setup service?

I’ve talked to a few founders who say they avoid docs until it become serious problem, curious what about your preferences ?

Helicone just got acquired by Mintlify and the project is reportedly moving into maintenance mode, which means security updates will continue but active feature development is likely done.

For teams running Helicone in production, this raises the obvious question: what should you switch to?

I went through a comparison of the main tools in the LLM observability / gateway space. Here’s a quick breakdown of the main options and when they make sense.

1. Respan
   Best if you want an all-in-one platform (gateway + observability + evals + prompt management).
   The architecture is observability-first with a gateway layer on top.

2. Langfuse
   Good open-source option focused mainly on LLM tracing and evaluation.
   Popular with teams that want something self-hosted.

3. LangSmith
   Great if you are heavily invested in the LangChain ecosystem since the integrations are very deep.

4. Portkey
   Closest to Helicone in architecture.
   Mostly focused on the LLM gateway layer (routing, caching, fallback).

5. Braintrust
   Strongest for evaluation and experimentation workflows.
   Good for teams running systematic evals in CI/CD.

6. Arize Phoenix
   Fully open-source and built around OpenTelemetry, which is nice if you already run an OTel stack.

Overall it feels like the space is splitting into three categories:

• gateway tools

• observability / tracing tools

• evaluation platforms

Some newer tools try to combine all three. Check full comparison below:

Hey Community,

I'm Hemang, co-founder of Clidey. While building Docucod – our platform for generating and maintaining technical documentation – we needed a simple, fast, and flexible way to host the docs.

We started with Next.js + Vercel, but it felt like overkill. SSR wasn’t needed, and we ran into vague webhook errors and deployment issues. It felt like too much complexity for a static documentation site.

So we built Dory – a minimal static site generator optimized for technical documentation. It's built with Preact, Vite, Tailwind, FontAwesome, Mermaid, and Typescript.

What makes Dory work for us:

• Reads a folder of .mdx files

• A single dory.json defines structure/layout

• No SSR, no cloud lock-in

• Fast builds, minimal config, deploy anywhere

The goal with Dory is to keep things truly simple — easy to set up, easy to use, and effortless to deploy for anyone building static documentation. Its design is inspired by great tools like Gitbook, Docusaurus, Readme, Mintlify, and Read the Docs. While we plan to add more features over time, simplicity will remain the core principle.

Once it becomes a bit more stable, we'll do a proper comparison to see load times, bundle size, all the good stuff.

It’s early (beta!), but it’s working well for us, and we’d love feedback from the community.

Repo: ⁦https://github.com/clidey/dory

Thanks for checking it out! If you would like to create documentation for your open source project, you can do it here: https://docucod.com/oss

So I've been asked to investigate any possibility for AI documentation generation tools for my team. I've seen swimm.io and mintlify, they look cool but both are 3rd party apps that send data to their own servers over the cloud and thus put sensitive data at risk. Anything else? Or are the classic tools like sphinx/mkdocs still the go-to.

I've been told any AI that uses copilot or Gemini is fine, as those are the only two AIs we are allowed to use at work.

I’ve been hunting for a long time for a tool that lets me edit and share API docs generated from an OpenAPI spec, but I still haven’t found one that really fits my needs.

So I started building my own OpenAPI viewer with some “vibe-coding.” It’s a CLI + Next.js viewer, plus a bunch of Claude-code commands so I can ask the AI to tweak the YAML for me. I’m planning to open-source it soon.

That got me wondering: in this AI era, which tools are actually popular for API docs in web-dev projects?

I’ve used Stoplight for a while—nice editor, nice viewer—but ever since AI-assisted editors showed up, working without built-in AI support feels kinda clunky.

What are you all using on your personal or company projects?

Most docs are boring, or worse, nonexistent! But, they could be awesome... with LLM. Cursor (or any LLM) is a pretty good starting point for generating documentation.

I'm launching Playbook—a platform that makes it super simple to launch doc sites. Check it out on Product Hunt and give it a try.