DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

You know, I think normally the common sense buy-vs-build wisdom would win out here, but this is truly an offering that is trivial to build out and is aimed towards an audience that can forgive the common UX perils of home built solutions.

Not to mention there are great off the shelf open source alternatives that work FANTASTIC and have most of the offerings listed on this SaaS product. I use https://github.com/Rebilly/generator-openapi-repo which took literally minutes to setup.

Here's my workflow:

* I type "npm start" in my docs project repo and load the tab that contains the syntax-highlighting enabled editor window in the browser.

* I modify my swagger.yml to update my documentation in the editor

* I use the dev preview tab (a separate node web dev server on another port) to see how the documentation looks

* Once I'm satisfied, I commit and push everything into the git backed repo.

My api docs exist on a github page so I don't even need to worry about hosting. As soon as I push my changes, they are live on my docs site. I've setup a CNAME record to point apidocs.mycompany.com to the github page and presto, I have a whitelabeled documentation site that I can update on a dime, for free, with absolutely zero monthly charge.

I have a hard time understanding how even the most elementary of developer couldn't manage to do this. I can't imagine it takes more than two hours for a mediocre web developer to get running (at most).

At what point do you have the financial responsibility to reasonably consider implementing an elementary task yourself instead of SaaSifying yet another area of your company? $49/mo is less than my hourly rate, in theory, but doing it once means one less SaaS bill at the end of the month.

In what use case is buying this product justifiable?

I literslly just launched our startups product documentation site with VuePress and had a great experience. - host the git repo on github - use github pages to manage the web hosting, it even gives you SSL for free - VuePress generate beautiful docs too and has a super low learning curve.

The one issue with the above setup is that it’s just too techy for the average person. I was looking for freelancers to hire to help me buildout the documentation, annotated images etc. The average writer is far more used to WYSIWYG editors like Word and would have no idea how to use Git. If this solution allows non tech users to collaborate on the documentation, they may be on to something.

> SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me.

It strikes me as a really, really bad idea. Besides the obvious lock-in issues, I've found the only hope of keeping documentation uptodate is to either generate it from the code or keep it checked it in git besides the code.

What's really needed are (1) authoring tools that can produce decent documentation (ideally as docbook XML or maybe asciidoc) for checkin and (2) product guys who are willing to write docs for features before or during feature development and (3) translation services that can actually do a decent job between the big three business languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish).

It's frustrating that 1, 2, and 3 are so very hard to find. Many products live or die by their lack of documentation, but there don't be seem any simple solutions here.

Agreed. Had to shutter the docs I had on ReadMe.io when they upped the pricing. Moved to GitBook, then they too upped the pricing. Now I just keep my private docs locally and in a private S3 bucket. Harder for less tech-savy people to edit them, but it's basically free.

I get that these companies need to make money, but $35-40/month is a tough sell for personal projects and the like. I happily pay for GitHub at $7 or $12/month and I wish one of these many companies would offer that pricing tier for docs.

I agree with this in principle, except that a good docs library should also have nice full text searching capability. I've yet to see a FT search capability that works nicely with a static doc site.