Cloud Parts

Mintlify

A hosted documentation platform: MDX pages and a docs.json file in your Git repository become a docs site with an API playground generated from OpenAPI, search, and llms.txt, Markdown and MCP access for AI agents.

What it is
Documentation sites
Type
Commercial product
Made by
Mintlify
License
Proprietary
Facts checked
9 October 2026
Website

What it is

A Mintlify site is a folder in a Git repository: MDX pages plus a docs.json file at its root. docs.json needs four fields (name, theme, colors.primary and navigation) and holds everything else, from branding to integrations and API settings. Mintlify’s GitHub App deploys the site whenever you push to the production branch, and on Pro and Enterprise plans every pull request gets a preview deployment with a shareable URL. People who don’t use Git can edit in a web editor that syncs to the same repository. The mint CLI runs a local preview (mint dev), validates the build in strict mode, including any OpenAPI files (mint validate), and finds broken internal links (mint broken-links). Pages use built-in components such as steps, tabs, callouts and code groups.

API reference comes from OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2 documents, stored in the repository or fetched from a URL: each endpoint becomes an interactive playground page, though $ref works only inside one document. For AI agents, Mintlify hosts an always-current /llms.txt (split into indexes under /_llms/ once it passes 100,000 characters) and /llms-full.txt, serves every page as Markdown at its URL plus .md or when asked with Accept: text/markdown, advertises both in Link headers, and runs a search MCP server with tools to search the docs, read pages and report problems. Its search has run on Trieve’s retrieval engine; Mintlify bought Trieve in July 2025.

Mintlify is a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee, from Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch. The free Starter plan includes 5 editor seats, a custom domain, the web editor, authentication, the MCP server and the API playground. Pro costs $450 a month billed annually ($540 monthly) and adds unlimited seats, the AI assistant and agent, automations and preview deployments. Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM and RBAC, offline exports and self-hosting on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud or any Kubernetes cluster.

Why teams pick it

  • Docs as code without building the site yourself: MDX in your repository, deploys on push, and strict validation and link checks in the CLI
  • Interactive API reference generated from OpenAPI 3.0 to 3.2, so the reference follows the spec
  • AI-agent access built in: generated llms.txt and llms-full.txt, a Markdown version of every page, a search MCP server and Link headers that point agents to them
  • A free Starter plan (relaunched in September 2026) with a custom domain, web editor, authentication, MCP server and API playground

Watch out for

  • A hosted, proprietary platform: the assistant, agent, preview deployments and analytics need Pro at $450 a month or more, and SSO, multi-repo and self-hosting need Enterprise
  • Pages rely on Mintlify’s own MDX components and docs.json; offline export (Enterprise) has no search, must be served from a domain root and still loads some assets from external hosts
  • Security incidents on the shared platform: in March 2024 an attacker obtained admin tokens and 91 customers’ GitHub tokens were compromised, and in November 2025 unscoped static assets allowed cross-site scripting on customers’ docs domains until a fix 45 minutes after notice
  • OpenAPI support is limited to internal $refs within one document; external references aren’t resolved

How it fits with other technologies

docs.json: a guides tab and an API reference tab generated from openapi.yaml · json

{
  "$schema": "https://mintlify.com/docs.json",
  "theme": "mint",
  "name": "Acme API",
  "colors": { "primary": "#0b6e4f" },
  "navigation": {
    "tabs": [
      { "tab": "Guides", "groups": [{ "group": "Get started", "pages": ["index", "quickstart"] }] },
      { "tab": "API reference", "openapi": "openapi.yaml" }
    ]
  }
}

Preview and check it locally#

Next to that docs.json: index.mdx, quickstart.mdx and an OpenAPI 3.1 file with one endpoint.

bash
npm i -g mint            # the Mintlify CLI; needs Node.js 20.17 or newer
mint dev                 # local preview that reloads as you edit

mint validate            # strict build, including the OpenAPI file
# success build validation passed

mint broken-links        # after a typo in index.mdx: [quickstart](/quickstrat)
# found 1 broken links in 1 files
#
# index.mdx
#  ⎿  /quickstrat

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Mintlify yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2022–2026

Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee built products for their classmates in college before founding Mintlify in 2022 and joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch. Their launch post named the problem plainly: writing documentation is hard, and building and maintaining the platform to host it is even harder. The pitch was docs written in Markdown and quick to set up, “opinionated when you’re lazy but infinitely flexible when you need it to be”.

By its $18M Series A in September 2024, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Mintlify hosted docs for thousands of companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Cursor, Pinecone and Zapier, and over 20% of the latest YC batch. Earlier that year, in March 2024, it had disclosed a breach in which an attacker used leaked admin tokens and 91 customers’ GitHub tokens were compromised. In November 2024, two months after Jeremy Howard proposed the format, it began generating llms.txt and llms-full.txt for every site, and in July 2025 it bought Trieve, whose retrieval engine already powered its search.

In April 2026 Mintlify raised a $45M Series B at a $500M valuation, saying it served over 20,000 companies and that nearly half of documentation traffic came from AI agents and AI-assisted workflows. It now describes documentation as a knowledge layer for people and agents, and in September 2026 it relaunched a free Starter plan.

Why it’s built this way

Docs as code, with the platform hosted
Every page is a file in your repository so docs get Git history and review, while Mintlify runs the build, hosting and search that teams otherwise rebuild themselves.
Opinionated defaults
The launch promise was a good-looking site with little setup, staying flexible for teams that need to customize it.
Generate a copy for language models
Mintlify bet that every company would publish two versions of its docs, one for humans and one for LLMs, so it generates llms.txt, llms-full.txt and Markdown pages automatically rather than asking authors to maintain them.
Own the search stack
With over 23 million queries a month in its customers’ docs, Mintlify bought Trieve, the retrieval engine already behind its search, to build that infrastructure for scale.

Timeline

  1. 2022

    Founded by Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee; Y Combinator Winter 2022

  2. 2024

    Discloses a breach of admin and GitHub tokens in March; $18M Series A in September

  3. 2024

    Generates llms.txt and llms-full.txt for every site from November

  4. 2025

    Acquires Trieve in July; fixes a cross-site scripting flaw in static assets in November

  5. 2026

    $45M Series B in April; free Starter plan relaunched in September

Sources17 · facts checked 9 October 2026

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