Mintlify Brings Back a Free Plan, but the AI Stays Paid

Mintlify has relaunched a free plan, called Starter, that gives teams a hosted docs site with a custom domain, a web editor and an MCP server at no cost, co-founder Han Wang said in a Sept. 28 post on the Mintlify blog. Every AI feature Mintlify sells stays on the paid plans.

What Starter includes

Starter covers publishing and agent access, not AI answers. Wang lists a custom domain, the web editor, Mintlify authentication, “an MCP server so agents can read your docs properly,” an API playground and built-in components that can be restyled with CSS and JavaScript. Starter comes with five editor seats. Wang said it is not “a time-bound trial meant to expire and convert you in thirty days.”

Mintlify’s pricing page, checked Sept. 29, lists Starter with “5 editor seats” and no AI features. Pro adds unlimited editor seats plus the Agent, the Assistant, Automations, preview deployments and admin APIs. Pro comes with 10,000 AI credits a month, and overage costs $0.01 per credit. An Assistant answer costs 25 credits and an automation update costs 250.

The post gives no usage, traffic or page limits for Starter, and it doesn’t say what happens to accounts on older plans.

The pitch is against building your own

Wang aims Starter at teams that build their own docs site, not at teams choosing between vendors. “Building your own docs is a worse trade than it looks,” he wrote. “The cost of a homegrown docs site always comes after deploying it.” He calls docs “infrastructure that is core to your product and GEO,” the generative-engine version of search optimization.

We read the MCP server’s place on the free tier as part of that pitch: a team that wants AI tools to read its docs gets that at no cost, while the assistant that answers readers’ questions stays on Pro.

Key takeaways

• Mintlify’s Starter plan is free with no time limit, per the Sept. 28 announcement.
• It includes a custom domain, web editor, authentication, an MCP server, an API playground and five editor seats.
• The Assistant, Agent, Automations and preview deployments are Pro features, billed against 10,000 monthly credits.
• Mintlify hasn’t published Starter’s usage limits.

The take

We think a free tier with a custom domain and an MCP server is a strong opening offer against Docusaurus and Starlight, where the software is free but the hosting, search and upkeep aren’t. The split is honest about where Mintlify’s costs sit: AI answers burn model tokens, static pages mostly don’t. The gap is the unpublished limits, and we’d want those before moving a production site. Until Mintlify says how much traffic or how many pages a free site can carry, “free for good” is a promise without a size.