Lekhora

Posted on Oct 31 Edited on Oct 31 Originally published at lekhora.dev

What GitBook, Mintlify and ReadMe actually cost a 5-person team in 2026

#documentation #saas #devtools #startup

For a five-person team running three doc sites, GitBook costs $255 a month on annual billing. Mintlify is free until you need a sixth editor or preview deployments, then $450, though it does not publish what three sites cost. ReadMe is $250 a month for one project and does not publish a price for three.

Those numbers come from each company's own pricing page, checked on 31 October 2026. The rest of this post shows the working so you can redo it for your own team.

One disclosure before the math. We build Lekhora, a hosted docs tool that competes with all three. We have tried to describe each product the way its own team would, including where it is the better deal.

The team we are pricing

Five people edit docs: two engineers, a product manager, a support lead and someone in marketing.
Three sites: product docs, an API reference, and docs for a second product. Each needs its own custom domain or subdomain.
All three sites are public. Private docs change the answer, and we note where.
Prices are per month. Where a vendor offers annual and monthly billing, we show both.

GitBook: $255 a month

GitBook prices along two axes: a plan for each site, plus a fee for each member. On the paid plans you pay both. The plan you need for a custom domain is Essential, which was called Premium until recently.

Plan	Per site	Per member	Three sites, five editors
Essential, billed annually	$65	$12	$255 a month ($3,060 a year)
Essential, billed monthly	$79	$15	$312 a month
One Ultimate site for private docs, two Essential, billed annually	$249 and $65	$12	$439 a month

The math for the first row: three sites at $65 is $195, five members at $12 is $60, and $195 plus $60 is $255.

Two things to check against your own setup. GitBook's billing policy does not say whether members are counted once per organization or once per site; we assumed once per organization, which is the cheaper reading. And authenticated access, the feature that puts docs behind a login, is only on Ultimate, so one private site moves that site from $65 to $249.

Where GitBook is the better deal: a team with one site. One Essential site and five members is $125 a month, the lowest paid price of the three for a branded site on your own domain. Its block editor is also one of the best in the category for people who do not write Markdown.

Mintlify: free, then $450 a month

Mintlify has the most generous free plan here and the steepest step after it. Starter costs nothing and includes five editor seats, a custom domain, the web editor and the API playground. A five-person team with one public site can run on it indefinitely.

The step comes when you need any of these:

A sixth editor. Starter caps seats at five; Pro has unlimited editors.
Preview deployments for pull requests, which are listed under Pro.
The AI assistant and writing agent, which moved off the free plan in August 2026.

Pro is $450 a month billed annually, or $540 billed monthly, and includes 10,000 AI credits a month. That is $5,400 a year.

Three sites is where the published pricing runs out. Mintlify's docs say an organization can have several deployments, one per product, but the pricing page does not say how a second or third deployment is billed. Combining several repos into one site is an Enterprise feature. If you need three sites, ask their sales team before you plan a budget around $0 or $450.

If you remember Mintlify at $150 a month, you are not wrong. Pro was $150, then $250 in 2025, was dropped in mid-2026, and came back at $450 in August.

Where Mintlify is the better deal: a small team with one public site and no need for previews. Free is hard to beat, and the default theme is excellent.

ReadMe: $250 a month for one project

ReadMe prices by plan, and each plan includes a set number of projects. Starter is free with one project, one admin and one version. Pro is $250 a month, billed annually, with one project, five admins and unlimited versions; each admin after five is $20.

For our team, Pro covers one of the three sites. ReadMe lists "multiple combined projects" under Enterprise and publishes no Enterprise price, so the three-site number is a sales conversation.

Add-ons sit on top of every plan:

Ask AI, the AI search for readers, is $150 a month.
Extended API logs and history are $100 a month.

One Pro project with Ask AI is $400 a month.

Where ReadMe is the better deal: private API docs. Pro includes private docs at $250, where GitBook's equivalent is the $249 Ultimate site plus member fees. ReadMe also sells API usage logs and dashboards alongside the docs.

Side by side

The cheapest option depends less on the vendor than on how many sites you run and what tips you over a plan limit.

Tool	One site, five editors	Three sites, five editors	What raises the price
GitBook	$125 a month	$255 a month	Each new site and each new member; private docs need Ultimate
Mintlify	$0 on Starter, $450 on Pro	Not published	A sixth editor, preview deployments or AI moves you to Pro
ReadMe	$250 a month on Pro	Not published	Admins after five, Ask AI, extended logs, more than one project

Annual billing throughout. On monthly billing GitBook's three-site figure is $312 and Mintlify Pro is $540.

What we do differently

We started Lekhora because the hard part of these bills is not the size. It is that the number moves every time you add a site, an editor or a reader behind a login, and you find out at renewal.

So we chose one number: $29 a month, for unlimited sites, editors and readers. One public site is free. We can afford that because the sites are static files rebuilt from your Git repo, which keeps hosting close to free, and because we do not bundle AI credits. If you want AI search, it runs on your own API key.

The trade-offs are real, and you should weigh them:

Lekhora is not available yet. We are inviting the first teams from a waitlist.
We are a small team. GitBook, Mintlify and ReadMe have years of features we do not.
If you fit Mintlify's free plan today and will for the next year, that is the better price.

Whichever tool you pick, run the math for the team you expect to be in twelve months, not the one you are today. Count the sites, count everyone who will want to fix a typo, and check which of those numbers your plan charges for.

Sources

All checked on 31 October 2026. Prices change often in this category, so check the live pages before you decide.

Lekhora is hosted docs from your Git repo at one flat price. If that is useful to your team, join the waitlist. Corrections to any figure here are welcome at hello@lekhora.dev.

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