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Comment by regecks | Hacker News Reader

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 site are not loading in time from Australia. The `main.{digest}.js` file is reliably giving me a 15s download time (not TTFB, oddly) (http://i.imgur.com/ay6le8H.png), which causes the entire page to be blank. I have like a 300MS RTT to the server. Get a CDN and use it effectively.

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> 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.

I'm happy to hear your feedback @dnomad. I'll be notifying you once we get to these challenges.

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.

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!

Agree. $40/mo is a bit steep for just documentation and also when VuePress exists for... free.

Hey @regecks, While confluence is extensible, what DeveloperHub.io provides is quite different from confluence offering. DeveloperHub.io is about unifying the experience for both technical writers and developers, while providing you top-notch support and user experience. Extensibility is inevitable, and we are working on integrations one by one as requested by our customers.

At the moment, we provide data portability on e-mail request, but very soon we'll provide you the tools to export and to handle your documentation outside of our website, and to import it back.

We are aware of the longer loading times in Australia due to having our servers in the Ireland. We will be launching soon our CDN to provide faster site speed. Sorry about that!

Keep updated!

Hey again, A CDN and compression is now activated. We achieved 2.3x faster application and only 300ms difference between first meaningful paint in London and in Hong Kong. Can you please give it another try now ;)

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

Hey @pbreit, The outline exists to show the user where can they edit, we've tried previously without it and users were confused! The rectangles surely do not show on the live pages nonetheless.

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