Hacker News Reader

Comment by ollybee | Hacker News Reader

How is a company like mintlify getting so many big name customers for what appears to be a static site generator + hosting? Is there some secret sauce I'm missing, what is the value proposition?

View on HN

fun fact: last BigCo I worked in had an elaborate architecture/security bar for new applications/features but offered a clever workaround - you could use a pre-approved solution and skip numerous quality checks and approvals, so every single PO was pushing for that specific solution.

The result? A static html with 500 ppl audience was billing a whooping 2k EUR a month, because that was the cost of that pre-approved architecture.

Best part - I was championing a company wide solution for that problem for over a year, which resulted in board level special operation with 100k budget only to get that budget snugged by people couple steps above the ladder.

Lots of these companies are YC companies, and they tend to use other YC products. For those that aren't, its easier to just use what other big names are using, and having YC as a backing name is quite useful in that regard.

Convenience and developer uncertainty. I fall pray to the "it's paid, so it must be better" fallacy, and the "they know what they are doing, they are pros" illogicality.

I genuinely don't know, especially for Vercel to be using them. Vercel themselves can easily be used to host static-ish documentation.

But it looks like Mintlify are using Vercel on the backend: https://vercel.com/blog/mintlify-scaling-a-powerful-document...

So it's just a Vercel wrapper?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com