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

developerhub.io

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

#21

Post by pbreit »

regecks wrote: post #10

SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me. Writing documentation is a big investment and startups tend to come and go ("it's been an incredible journey"). $39/mo is much more than what it costs to self-host Confluence, which for all its flaws at least leaves you in control of your data and is super extensible. Improve the data portability story and it'd be a lot more attractive. Additionally the actual docs and demo si…

The empty page dummy text rectangles are extremely annoying. There's no reason pure text needs a spinner.

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

#22

Post by pbreit »

debaserab2 wrote: post #11
nodesocket wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$39 a month for beautiful documentation, and once they finish API with Swagger support it is great value. I can see for open source projects that don't generate revenue the price being expensive, but as a SaaS business owner the pricing feels just right.

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/Rebill…

Would need to see your docs before making a comment.

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

#24

Post by stockkid »

I find that the best way to build docs is to use some sort of a static html generator and host the html yourself, which is not at all hard to do. There are free and open source themes available to host your own docs in various site generators.

My personal favorite is hugo. Previously I have built a documentation for a large project [0] using hugo and it gave us 100% control over how we design or host it. Outsourcing a doc to a SaaS seems like something I would never do if I cared about the product/software.

[0] - https://docs.dgraph.io

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

#25

Post by gkoberger »

nathancahill wrote: post #17
regecks wrote: post #10

SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me. Writing documentation is a big investment and startups tend to come and go ("it's been an incredible journey"). $39/mo is much more than what it costs to self-host Confluence, which for all its flaws at least leaves you in control of your data and is super extensible. Improve the data portability story and it'd be a lot more attractive. Additionally the actual docs and demo si…

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…

Hey Nathan! We've never raised our prices at ReadMe for existing customers. I think you might be misremembering :)

That being said, the value of having up-to-date docs that anyone can edit is invaluable. Docs are more than just reference guides!

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

#26

Post by cnj »

Congrats on launching!

I regularly spend time on developer documentation (just yesterday roughly two hours...). Unfortunately, your messaging does not resonate with me at all.

Creating (good) documentation will never be easy, or hassle-free. We have to communicate/teach technical concepts to a wide range of developers, from beginners to experts, from native-speakers to I-barely-understand-english. Having a huge document with lot's of details is bad, because one can't grasp the big picture. Not documenting all details is also bad. Having multiple documents per topic (e.g. a Getting Started/Tutorial and a full reference) is a hassle to maintain.

I believe Documentation Review is at least as important as Code Review. What you think you're communicating, and what others are understanding, may be very different. Having at least one other pair of eyes look over it is extremely helpful. It is also helpful to maintain a consistent writing style if several developers contribute to the documentation.

Some things that may make my life easier:

- Help me keeping my writing style consistent (e.g. "In this case, foo should be used" and "In this case, you should use bar" are not consistent)

- Help me keeping my text easy to understand (like http://hemingwayapp.com)

- Help me keeping multiple documents in sync (e.g. "You've changed foo_bar to fooBar in reference.md, you should also look at tutorial.md lines 25 and 34")

- Help with the workflow coordinating multiple reviews (we're actually using Github PRs, and I don't see much room for improvement)

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

#27

Post by lstamour »

gkoberger wrote: post #25
nathancahill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey Nathan! We've never raised our prices at ReadMe for existing customers. I think you might be misremembering :) That being said, the value of having up-to-date docs that anyone can edit is invaluable. Docs are more than just reference guides!

This looks pretty different to me? http://web.archive.org/web/20160530181746/https://readme.io/...

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

#28

Post by gkoberger »

lstamour wrote: post #27
gkoberger wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Nathan! We've never raised our prices at ReadMe for existing customers. I think you might be misremembering :) That being said, the value of having up-to-date docs that anyone can edit is invaluable. Docs are more than just reference guides!

This looks pretty different to me? http://web.archive.org/web/20160530181746/https://readme.io/...

Haha whoops, I mean we never raised prices on existing customers. But even then, those new prices are just from the past week!

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

#29

Post by [deleted] »

gkoberger wrote: post #25
nathancahill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey Nathan! We've never raised our prices at ReadMe for existing customers. I think you might be misremembering :) That being said, the value of having up-to-date docs that anyone can edit is invaluable. Docs are more than just reference guides!

[deleted]
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