Docszero vs ReadMe: free tiers, branding and the price of a second project

ReadMe is built around API references. An OpenAPI file becomes an explorable reference with real request logs against your own keys, and if that is the documentation you are publishing, ReadMe does something Docszero does not do at all.

Docszero is built around prose. Guides, handbooks, runbooks, onboarding, internal notes: Markdown that should be a searchable website without a project plan.

Both have a free plan. ReadMe’s Starter is $0 for one project and one version, and it keeps ReadMe’s own branding on your docs. Docszero’s free plan is $0 for one site on a docszero.com subdomain, and the badge comes off at $19.99 a month rather than $250.

ReadMe’s free plan includes a custom domain and ours does not. If a domain on a free plan is the deciding feature, ReadMe Starter wins that line outright — as long as you can live with their branding on the page, which Starter does not let you remove.

The free plans are close enough that the interesting question is the next step. ReadMe lists Pro at $250 a month billed annually. Docszero lists Pro at $19.99 a month, or $199.90 a year.

A year of ReadMe Pro is roughly fifteen years of Docszero Pro. That gap is not a trick: it is what you get for not being an API-reference platform. ReadMe is maintaining an OpenAPI renderer, a request-logging pipeline and API key management, and charging for it. If you need those, the price is the price.

• Your documentation is an API reference generated from OpenAPI, and the reference is the point.
• You want readers to make real calls with their own keys from inside the docs.
• You want request logs and API usage metrics tied to the reference.
• You need a custom domain while paying nothing at all.
• You maintain several published versions of a reference at once.

Docszero does none of that. A mermaid diagram and a fenced code block are as close as we get to an API reference, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.

• The docs are prose: guides, handbooks, internal documentation, a knowledge base.
• You want more than one site without moving to a plan priced for an API company.
• You want their name off your docs for tens of dollars a month, not hundreds.
• Some of the source material is a Word document or a PDF.
• You want the export button to work on the plan you are on, free included.

Bringing ReadMe docs over

ReadMe’s guides are Markdown, and its bi-directional sync can put them in a Git repository. Zip that folder and upload it: headings become pages, images travel with them, and internal links are rewritten. What will not come across is the API reference itself — that is ReadMe’s own machinery, and it needs to stay where it is or be replaced.

Plenty of teams run both: the API reference on a tool built for API references, and the guides, handbooks and internal docs on something that costs $19.99 a month.