Documentation platform cost calculator
What is your docs platform actually costing you?
Four questions. It works out what GitBook, ReadMe or Mintlify costs you a year, what the same documentation costs on Docusaurus, and how long a migration takes to pay for itself. Every vendor price came off the vendor's own pricing page.
Vendor pricing checked 13 August 2026Which tool are you on?
The three most common places product documentation lives before it moves to Docusaurus.
Which plan?
Prices shown are the annual billing rate, which is what the vendors advertise.
How many people edit the docs?
Anyone who writes or publishes. Readers are free everywhere.
Anything else you pay for?
Add-ons, a second site, AI credits, anything else on the same invoice.
What you pay nowToday
GitBook
Premium, billed annually
$1,644a year
$137 a month
What the same docs costDocusaurus
Docusaurus
Self hosted, open source, in your own repository
$0a year
Licence, hosting, search and analytics all sit on free tiers
The recurring cost is near zero because the software is free and a static site is cheap to serve. What you actually pay for is the one time migration, and the engineering attention to own the repository afterwards.
You would save, per year
$1,644
Over three years
$4,932
At today's prices, before any vendor increase.
Ask AI layer, if you want one
$50 to $200
A month for Kapa, Inkeep or similar, or set one up in-house. Not counted in the saving, because most of the plans compared here do not bundle an assistant either.
Estimates, not quotes. Vendor prices are the public annual billing rates read on 13 August 2026 and exclude tax. The Docusaurus side is zero because the licence, hosting, search and analytics all sit on free tiers. An AI answer layer is listed but not counted, since most of the plans compared here do not bundle an assistant either. This is a cost comparison rather than a quote: what a migration itself costs depends on how many pages move and what shape they are in.
Side by side
GitBook vs Docusaurus
Cost is one column of the decision. This is the rest of it, grouped so you can open only the part you care about. Nothing here is free of tradeoffs, and pretending otherwise would make this a brochure rather than a calculator.
Read this before you switch
Docusaurus is not free, it is unbundled
The licence costs nothing. What you were renting from a vendor becomes something your team owns. For some teams that is the whole point. For others it is a bad trade, and it is better to know which one you are before the migration than after.
You lose the visual editor
Every hosted tool here ships a browser editor a product manager can use without touching Git. On Docusaurus, contributions arrive as pull requests unless you put a CMS in front. If half your writers do not use Git, plan for that before you move rather than after.
SSO and gated docs get harder
Private documentation is a checkbox on the hosted tools and a build on Docusaurus, usually an auth proxy in front of the static site. If your docs sit behind a login for enterprise customers, price that in.
The AI assistant becomes a decision
GitBook Ultimate, ReadMe Ask AI and Mintlify Pro each bundle an assistant. On Docusaurus you either add a third party answer layer, which is the $50 to $200 a month line in the card above, or you do without. The upside is that your content stays yours and stays portable to whichever one wins.
Someone has to own the repository
Dependency updates, broken builds, plugin upgrades. It is not much, but it is not nothing, and it needs a named owner rather than whoever notices first.
What you get back
Your content is plain MDX in your own repository, reviewed like code, versioned like code, and portable to anything. No per seat tax on adding a writer, and no pricing page changing your budget for you.
Questions
The things people ask next
Where do these prices come from?
Straight off each vendor's public pricing page, read on 13 August 2026. GitBook: $65 per site per month for Premium, $249 for Ultimate, both on annual billing, plus $12 per user per month. ReadMe: Pro at $250 a month billed annually with five admins included and $20 for each admin after that, Enterprise from $3,000 a month, Ask AI a $150 add-on. Mintlify: Starter free with five editor seats, Pro at $450 a month on annual billing with 10,000 agent credits and $0.01 per credit over.
Why annual billing rates?
Because that is the number the vendors advertise, and comparing an advertised rate against a real hosting bill is the fairest version of the comparison. If you pay monthly, your real cost is higher than what this shows, so the saving is bigger than the number in the card.
Does Docusaurus really cost nothing to run?
The software does, and a static build is genuinely cheap to serve. Cloudflare Pages serves static assets free with no request cap, GitHub Pages is free for public repositories, Algolia DocSearch is free for qualifying public documentation, and GA4 or Plausible covers analytics on a free tier. The one thing most teams add is an AI answer layer at roughly $50 to $200 a month. The cost that is real is the one time migration and the engineering attention to keep the repository healthy.
Which tool is easiest to migrate off?
Mintlify, by a distance, because your content is already MDX in your own Git repository. The work is mapping docs.json onto sidebars.ts and swapping Mintlify components for Docusaurus equivalents. GitBook is next, since Git Sync gives you Markdown, but GitBook's block syntax for hints, tabs, cards and OpenAPI blocks has to be rewritten. ReadMe is the hardest: rdmd, reusable content, recipes and its versioning model all need deliberate translation.
Will we lose our search rankings?
Only if the redirects are skipped. Every URL on the old site needs a 301 to its new address, and the sitemap needs resubmitting. Do that and rankings carry across. It is the single most commonly botched part of a docs migration, and also the cheapest part to get right.
Can we keep our custom domain and design?
Yes to both. The domain simply points somewhere else, and Docusaurus theming is CSS and React components, so the new site can look far more like your product than a hosted tool's theme editor allows.
What if we do not want to run it ourselves?
Then stay where you are, or move and have someone maintain it for you. Migrating to Docusaurus and then leaving it to rot is worse than paying a vendor. This calculator compares a rental cost against an ownership cost, and ownership only pays off when someone owns it.
Next step
Get the real number instead of the estimate
Send us your current docs URL and your invoice. We will come back with what the migration actually costs for your page count, what moves cleanly, what needs rewriting, and what your team can do without us. If the maths says stay where you are, we will tell you that.
Related reading: what separates API documentation developers trust, structuring docs so AI assistants quote them correctly, and developer portals.