For companies that rely on a strong developer experience, technical documentation is more than just a helpful resource—it is a key differentiator.

Given its importance, you might be asking: should you buy a software documentation tool, or build your system in-house?

We’ll guide you through the tradeoffs, drawing from the experiences of engineering leaders—Jamie Barton from Turso, Vijay Iyengar from Sierra (formerly Mixpanel), and Mary Torres from Stytch—who have both built and bought solutions in the past.

When building in-house makes sense

If you have engineering bandwidth, building documentation from scratch offers clear advantages.

Superior flexibility for custom experiences

Stripe docs are considered the gold standard, largely because they're custom-built for their unique product and users.

When your product has specific requirements that off-the-shelf solutions can’t fully support, building your own system allows you to create a deeply integrated and distinct experience for your users.

"It is great to have full control over the build, such as embedding custom components with data I own, or inserting my own API examples and response widgets in an API playground." —Jamie Barton, Engineer at Turso

Complete infrastructure control

With a custom solution, you maintain full control over hosting, deployment, and dependencies. For some companies, this level of oversight is critical to ensure reliability and mitigate external risks.

"You need to consider how an outage with your documentation impacts not only your docs, but your overall product. If your docs provider is down for any reason and you don’t have control over the resolution time, will it severely impact your business?" —Mary Torres, Engineering Manager at Stytch

The hidden layers of building documentation

While it may seem straightforward for an experienced developer, building documentation in-house often becomes more complex than anticipated, especially given modern expectations for the developer experience. What you initially scope as an upfront investment may only be the tip of the iceberg.

Here are a few key areas where additional investment is often required beyond your initial build.

Components that require more investment

1. Search
2. Building a scalable search experience requires a balance between result relevancy, performance, and UX. Often, open-source tools fall short, and creating a custom solution can take more time and resources than anticipated.
3. "Search was really difficult to build because the open-source tools were not sufficient. We wasted a lot of time trying to build in-house before just buying a tool." -Vijay Iyengar
4. AI-integrated chat
5. LLMs have reshaped expectations: developers now expect fast, summarized answers instead of sifting through search results. However, integrating AI effectively requires more than just plugging in a model. You need to fine-tune responses and handle hallucinations while maintaining performance.
6. UI elements
7. Traditional components—cards, dropdowns, toggles, code blocks, navigation tabs—require attention to detail to get right. The small aspects add up, such as spacing, animations, and accessibility, causing these elements to be more resource-intensive than they might appear.
8. URL structures
9. A clear and predictable URL structure is essential for organizing documentation, but you must plan for the complexities of API versioning, nested categories, and human-readable slugs. Invest time in mapping out your structure upfront, but be ready to refine it as your docs evolve.
10. "The biggest mistake I've made multiple times is underestimating the URL structure. I might initially map it as ‘apireference/introduction,’ but then I need to figure out how to map that URL to a markdown file... And as the API grows, the logic gets messier and more complex." -Jamie Barton, Engineer at Turso
11. Automated content generation
12. Auto-generating API docs can save time, but edge cases are common. Some languages still require manual updates, and certain endpoints might not fit well into automation workflows. While automation can streamline many tasks, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
13. "We have a service that we built to auto-generate our API reference code and all the code snippets. It doesn't support all languages, some of our languages have to be done by hand. Then, some of our endpoints are in different services than our main API, so those have to be written by hand as well." -Mary Torres, Engineering Manager at Stytch

Ongoing impact on engineering productivity

Without dedicated resources, ongoing maintenance of docs infrastructure can impact product development through context-switching and reduced deep work time.

“Leadership all agreed docs were important and needed work, but it was incredibly hard to prioritize staffing engineers to work on docs over new features." —Vijay Iyengar

You still need to document your docs

Building an in-house documentation solution comes with an ironic challenge—you'll also need to document how to use it.

From custom components to editing workflows, maintaining a knowledge base for your team adds another layer of upkeep. Engineers already struggle to keep product documentation up to date, so don’t underestimate the effort and documentation debt that an internal system can create.

When to consider buying a documentation tool

In buying a solution, you'll trade off the customization and infrastructure control benefits from earlier, and you'll need to factor in ongoing subscription costs. But you should weigh that against the engineering hours you’ll spend building and maintaining the feature set your customers need.

Today's API documentation tools provide out-of-the-box functionality such as:

• AI chat & search that provides context-aware answers
• Version control systems that manage different API versions or localization
• Automatic updates based on OpenAPI specs
• Interactive API playgrounds that let developers test endpoints
• Authentication handling to customize and auto-populate the testing environment

"If you do buy, you can use that time elsewhere. You’ll give up some flexibility and control, but you reap the rewards in efficiency." -Jamie Barton, Engineer at Turso

Many documentation platforms also offer a better editing workflow for both technical and non-technical teams.

Tools like Mintlify offer a docs-as-code approach through a bi-directional Git sync, meaning developers can quickly edit docs without leaving their tools or workflows. Meanwhile, product, support, and customer success teams can update content using a WYSIWYG, Notion-like interface, making it easier for more people to contribute and keep documentation up to date.

Making your decision

As with all build vs. buy decisions, the right choice depends heavily on your team's specific context.

"Start with the end goal in mind. Define the ideal documentation experience—dynamic, interactive, rich with user context—and then assess if building it in-house is realistic." -Jamie Barton, Engineer at Turso

When evaluating your options, ask yourself:

• What unique documentation requirements do we have?
• What's our timeline for implementation?
• How will our documentation needs evolve as our product grows?
• What engineering resources can we dedicate to documentation?

Most importantly, think long-term. Documentation is never "done”—it requires ongoing attention as your API evolves and your user base grows.

Remember that neither building nor buying is inherently better. Many teams find success with hybrid approaches, building custom components while leveraging existing platforms for core functionality. Make sure that your choice ultimately aligns with both your current needs and future growth.

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