Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

6 min readStableBeginner

Answers to the questions people ask most before adopting OwnDocs, plus a factual look at how it compares to the alternatives.

Product and Positioning

OwnDocs turns Markdown files into a full documentation website. It ships with search, sidebar navigation, and password protection built in, and runs on Next.js 16, React 19, and TypeScript 6. Teams use it for an external API reference, an internal knowledge base, or customer-facing product guides. The page structure, components, and hosting setup come ready-made, so you aren't building a docs site from scratch. See the Introduction for the full picture.

Hosted platforms run the infrastructure for you, but they charge per seat and limit what you can change. OwnDocs ships as source code you own — a one-time purchase under the MIT license, with no per-seat fees, no monthly subscriptions, and no vendor lock-in. You deploy it on Vercel, AWS, DigitalOcean, or your own server, and you can change any part of it. See the comparison below for the specifics.

Most documentation tools force a choice between control and setup time. Free static-site generators give you control but leave the theming, search, and component library to you. Hosted platforms give you a working site immediately but charge an ongoing subscription and limit what you can change. OwnDocs ships as source code you own, works without extra setup, and lets you change any part of it — 29 ready-made documentation components, dual access modes from a single environment variable, and built-in AI readiness through llms.txt and a "Copy page as Markdown" button on every page.

Comparing OwnDocs to Other Documentation Tools

The honest answer depends on what you're comparing OwnDocs to. Hosted SaaS platforms and free open-source generators solve the problem in opposite ways, and OwnDocs sits in a different spot from both. The tables below use each vendor's own current pricing and documentation pages, checked August 16, 2026 — vendor pricing changes, so confirm current numbers on their sites before you decide.

Against hosted, subscription-based platforms

Mintlify, GitBook, and ReadMe run your documentation site on their infrastructure and bill you for it every month. That gets you a working site fast, but the platform — not you — controls the code your site runs on, and the bill doesn't stop.

OwnDocs vs. hosted documentation platforms

Feature	RecommendedOwnDocs	Mintlify	GitBook	ReadMe
Pricing model	One-time purchase	Subscription, per workspace	Subscription, per site + per seat	Subscription, per admin seat
Free tier available	n/a — one-time purchase	Included	Included	Included
Self-hosted	Included	Enterprise plan only, frontend only	Frontend only (GPL-3.0); content still lives on GitBook	Not available
You own the platform source code	Included	Not available	Partial	Not available
Every editor pays a per-seat fee	cross — no seats, ever	Included	Included	Included

GitBook's own pricing page lists Premium at $65 per site per month and Ultimate at $249 per site per month, both billed annually, plus $12 per user per month on top — every editor needs a paid seat even if they only have view access. ReadMe's pricing page lists a free Starter plan capped at one project and one admin, a $250-per-month Pro plan billed annually with five admins included, and Enterprise pricing starting around $3,000 per month. Mintlify's Starter plan is free for up to five editor seats with no AI features, and its Pro plan is a paid, higher tier — check mintlify.com/pricing for the current number, since the page doesn't render a fixed figure. On self-hosting: Mintlify only offers it on Enterprise, and only for a custom frontend — its own content engine still runs behind the scenes. GitBook publishes an open-source frontend under the GPL-3.0 license that you can run yourself, but it renders content that still lives on GitBook's platform, and a private repository needs a separate commercial license. ReadMe doesn't publish a self-hosted option outside custom Enterprise contracts.

Against free, open-source static site generators

Docusaurus and Nextra are genuinely free, MIT-licensed, and self-hosted — against these two, OwnDocs isn't cheaper and doesn't offer anything unique about owning your source code. The real difference is how much of the site you have to build yourself before it's ready to publish.

OwnDocs vs. free, open-source generators

Feature	RecommendedOwnDocs	Docusaurus	Nextra
Cost	One-time purchase	Free	Free
License	MIT	MIT	MIT
Documentation components included	29 components, ready to use	Base set via the classic preset; deep branding means "swizzling" components that can break on minor upgrades	Callout, Cards, Steps, Tabs, and FileTree ship with the theme; layout and navigation are wired by hand
Search included by default	Included	cross — needs Algolia DocSearch (eligibility required) or a self-run Algolia index	cross — needs a manual Pagefind install and build step
Built-in version switching	Included	Included	Not available
Sidebar, search index, and breadcrumbs auto-generated from files	Included	partial — sidebar config is manual	Included

Docusaurus is Meta-backed, has native versioning, and a large plugin ecosystem — those are real strengths. Its own docs describe theme customization through "swizzling," and warn that swizzled components "may change in a backward-incompatible way between theme minor versions." Search isn't built in: Algolia's free DocSearch program has eligibility requirements, and a site that doesn't qualify has to run its own Algolia index. Nextra is the closer sibling technically — it's also built on Next.js — and its theme ships a real set of components, but its own start guide has you installing packages, writing next.config.mjs, and wiring a root layout by hand, and its search guide has you adding Pagefind as a separate dependency with your own postbuild step. Nextra also has no built-in version switching. OwnDocs gives you the same source ownership as either one, plus the component library and the generated sidebar, search, and version switcher already wired together — the tradeoff is that OwnDocs is a paid product and these two are free.

Content and Authoring

Pages come from files, with no configuration. Create an .mdx file and write — OwnDocs builds the sidebar, search index, breadcrumbs, table of contents, sitemap, and static pages for you. There's no routing config or build plugin to set up, and the file path is the URL. Content lives in version control next to the code it documents, so it gets the same review, diff, and rollback workflow as everything else in the repository, instead of living in a separate database your engineers can't git blame.

No. Create any .mdx file under app/ and it becomes a page — for example, app/guides/deployment.mdx becomes /guides/deployment. Directories become sidebar categories, and OwnDocs wires the new file into the sidebar, the search index, the sitemap, and the previous/next links automatically.

Ownership, Licensing, and Deployment

Yes. OwnDocs is a one-time purchase under the MIT license. There are no per-seat fees, no monthly subscriptions, and no vendor lock-in — you can modify, redistribute, and deploy it under the terms of that license.

Anywhere that runs Next.js: Vercel, AWS, DigitalOcean, or your own server. See Deployment for the specific steps for each target.

Access, Security, and AI

Yes. A single ACCESS_MODE environment variable switches the whole site between private (password-protected) and public (open) access. One deployment can serve internal team docs, client portals, or public product docs — you don't need separate installs for each.

Private mode uses JWT sessions with browser fingerprinting (a session is invalidated if the User-Agent or Accept-Language header changes), secure __Host- prefixed cookies, a salted and hashed cookie name, rate limiting on login attempts, and 4-layer crawler blocking so search engines and AI crawlers can't index protected pages. See the Introduction for the full list.

Yes. OwnDocs generates an llms.txt index and an llms-full.txt file with the full documentation content, both built for AI agents to consume in bulk. Every page also has a "Copy page as Markdown" button next to its title, so a reader can paste a page straight into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor.