Cost by billing shape
| Piattaforma | Forma di fatturazione | Costo mensile |
|---|
Three axes, not three tiers of the same thing
It's tempting to read Mintlify $450, ReadMe $250, and GitBook $65+$12/user as if they're all just "the Pro plan" at different price points on the same axis — they aren't. Mintlify's flat fee is a floor, not a ceiling: its AI features draw from a separate metered credit pool, so a docs team that leans hard on AI-assisted authoring can end up paying meaningfully more than the sticker $450, while a team that never touches the AI features pays exactly $450 regardless of team size or site count.
ReadMe's $250 is the true flat rate of the three — it already includes 5 admin seats with zero per-head editing cost, so a 3-person or 5-person team pays the identical $250 either way, and the plan doesn't multiply by number of doc sites the way GitBook's does. GitBook is the only one of the three that's genuinely linear on two separate axes at once: $65 per site plus $12 per additional user beyond the first — the same team documenting two products as two separate GitBook sites pays the $65 base twice, structurally different from Mintlify or ReadMe where a second product under the same account doesn't automatically double the platform fee.
Strumenti e hosting
Domande frequenti
Why do Mintlify, ReadMe, and GitBook bill so differently?
Each platform picked a different axis to charge on. Mintlify's Pro plan is a flat $450/month regardless of team size or number of doc sites, but layers a separate metered AI-credit system on top for its AI features — so your bill has a fixed floor plus a variable AI-usage component. ReadMe's Pro plan is also flat at $250/month and already includes 5 admin seats with no per-head editing cost, so a small team's bill barely moves as they add editors. GitBook is the most linear of the three: Premium is $65 per documentation site per month, plus $12 per additional user beyond the first — so GitBook is the only one of the three where publishing a second product's docs as a separate site directly doubles your site-level base cost.
Which platform is cheapest for a small single-product team?
For a small team (1-5 people) documenting a single product, GitBook is usually the cheapest of the three on pure list price — one site plus a handful of users lands well under $150/month, versus ReadMe's flat $250 or Mintlify's flat $450-plus-AI-credits floor. The ranking flips once you factor in AI-assisted authoring (Mintlify) or need more than 5 admins with zero per-seat friction (ReadMe) — cheapest depends on how much you value flat predictability versus per-unit efficiency at your actual team size.
When does GitBook stop being the cheap option?
GitBook's per-site fee is what breaks its cost advantage: because Premium is billed per site at $65/month each, a company documenting multiple products or multiple API versions as separate GitBook sites pays that $65 base again for every site, while Mintlify and ReadMe's flat plans don't multiply the same way for extra content within one plan. Two or three doc sites on GitBook can quickly cost more than ReadMe's single flat $250, even though GitBook looked cheapest for the one-site case.
What exactly are Mintlify's metered AI credits, and can I predict that cost?
Mintlify's Pro plan covers the core documentation hosting/authoring platform at a flat $450/month, but its AI-powered features (an in-docs Ask-AI assistant, AI-assisted content generation) draw from a separate, usage-metered credit pool rather than being unlimited inside the flat fee. Because Mintlify doesn't publish a simple per-credit dollar rate the way an LLM API does, this calculator asks you to enter your own estimated monthly AI add-on spend directly (check mintlify.com/pricing for the current metering detail) rather than guessing a rate that could be wrong — treat the AI line as the one genuinely variable cost among the three platforms.
Does visitor/reader traffic cost extra on any of these three?
No — this is one thing all three share, worth calling out because many SaaS pricing models do charge by traffic. Mintlify, ReadMe, and GitBook all price around authors/admins and (for GitBook) sites, not documentation page views or reader traffic, so a docs site going viral or getting indexed heavily by search doesn't move your bill on any of the three the way a metered API or a CDN would.