Conclusion: Mintlify refunded the payment. I moved the docs to a self-hosted solution.

tldr: Mintlify has a feature what you can use to ask anything about the docs from an AI companion. This feature costs you money, and you cannot turn it off.

Always check parts of a service that you cannot turn off and it involves features that are based on usage.

This story is about me. Yes, me, who owns this site. haha

Mintlify is great. This post is not against them or their product. I just would like to share this story so others could learn from it.

Mintlify sponsored Coolify a few months ago (because of this) to be on their Startup/Pro tier for a year. I said yes, because it was great for the community / users. The docs got improvements from a UI/UX point of view.

After a while, we realized that people REALLY use Coolify’s docs and it costs a lot _(1M views / month)

Why?

They have an AI feature that you could use to ask anything about the documentation. Sounds nice right? Yes it is, but from a cost point of view, it is risky.

What if your users asks a lot of questions? What if someone just wants to talk to the AI companion? What if someone would like to scam you?

After this realization, we agreed to disable this feature for now - they disabled it on their side, or not?!

Months went by, and one day, I woke up to a $400 bill. Woah. (btw, this is plus to your monthly plan, which is $150/month)

Okay, it was billed by mistake, but still.

Who wants to woke up to a huge bill for their documentation site? Well, not me.

I reached out to Mintlify support, and they said they will refund me. (Thank you!)

But in the meantime, I migrated Coolify to a self-hosted solution from Astro on live-stream.

Conclusion

Always check parts of a service that you cannot turn off and it involves features that are based on usage.