Every question, answered straight.
What's free, what's paid, why we never charge per seat, and what the growth engine does that no other docs tool will. No asterisks.
How pricing actually works
One rule runs the whole model: capture is free, acting is paid. You pay when you decide to email and nurture the contacts you've captured — never for seats, never for traffic.
What does Leed cost?
Free is $0 forever — not a trial. From there: Starter ~$250/mo, Growth ~$1,250/mo, and Enterprise is custom. What moves you up a tier is how many contacts you nurture and how much of the growth engine you switch on — never the size of your team or your traffic.
What exactly is free versus paid?
Capturing and holding contacts is free — up to 250 identified contacts on the free plan, with lead-capture forms, a custom domain, and aggregate analytics included. Acting on those contacts is paid: the free plan sends no marketing email, so the moment you want to email or nurture your leads at all, you move to a paid plan. You never pay to collect a lead, only to work it.
How does contact-based pricing work?
The value metric is identified contacts and the email / nurture volume you send them. Plans step up on those two numbers: Free holds 250 contacts, Starter 1,000 contacts with 5k emails/mo, Growth 10,000 contacts with 50k emails/mo, Enterprise unlimited. You pick the plan that matches the audience you're actively nurturing — nothing else changes the price.
What happens when I hit 250 contacts on the free plan?
Nothing breaks and no one gets locked out of your docs. You've simply reached the free tier's ceiling for capturing and holding contacts — free lets you collect up to 250, but not email or nurture them. To hold more than 250 and to start emailing and nurturing your leads at all, you upgrade to Starter. Your docs, unlimited users, and custom domain all keep working exactly as before.
Why anchor the paid price against a stack of tools?
Because that's what teams actually replace with Leed. A docs host, a product-analytics tool, a marketing-automation platform, and a social scheduler run roughly $5,000/mo together — and still can't show you one reader's full journey. Growth costs less than that assembled stack and does the one thing it can't: close the loop on exactly what each reader consumed. More on the cost of that sprawl in Taming the Martech Beast.
Is there a catch with the free plan?
No catch. Free means unlimited users, unlimited pages, a custom domain, AI authoring, both MCP servers, and lead capture up to 250 contacts — permanently. We'd rather you build your whole docs presence on Leed for free and grow into the paid growth engine when your docs start generating pipeline.
Genuinely free, not free-to-frustrate
Everything you need to publish beautiful docs with your whole team ships on the free plan — the parts other tools gate behind a paywall.
Is Leed really free? How is that sustainable?
Yes — the docs product is genuinely free and stays free. It's sustainable because Leed makes money on the growth engine: when your docs start capturing and nurturing leads at scale, you upgrade. Free docs are how we compete head-on with tools like Mintlify; the growth engine is how we earn.
What's included on the free plan?
Unlimited users, unlimited pages, your own custom domain, real-time and AI-native authoring, both MCP servers (Operator and Docs), lead-capture forms, aggregate analytics, and capture of up to 250 identified contacts. It's a complete docs platform, not a teaser.
Is the custom domain free too?
Yes — on every plan, including free. Your docs live on your own domain from day one. We don't hold your brand hostage behind an upgrade.
How is the free plan different from Mintlify's or GitBook's free tier?
Two ways. First, we never charge per seat, so your whole team can be in Leed for free. Second, even the free plan includes lead capture and both MCP servers — the beginning of a growth engine no docs competitor offers at any tier, let alone for free.
Will you make me upgrade to remove a badge or unlock basics?
The essentials — hosting, custom domain, unlimited users and pages, AI authoring — are all free. Removing the Leed badge is a Starter perk, but nothing about your docs' function is held back on free. You upgrade for the growth engine, not to unbreak the basics.
We will never charge you per seat
Per-seat pricing punishes you for putting your team where the work is. We do the opposite — on purpose.
Do you charge per user or per seat?
No — never. Every plan, including free, has unlimited users. Add your whole engineering, product, marketing, and support team at no additional cost. Seats are not, and will not be, part of how Leed is priced.
Why don't you charge per seat when everyone else does?
Because more of your team writing and maintaining docs in Leed is the entire point. Per-seat pricing quietly discourages exactly the behavior that makes docs good. We'd rather remove the friction and meter on the outcome — contacts you nurture — than tax collaboration.
Can I add contractors, contributors, or the whole company?
Yes. Invite as many editors, reviewers, and contributors as you like on any plan. There is no seat count to manage, no per-head bill, and no upgrade prompt when your team grows.
Should I bring my sales team in, not just docs authors?
Yes — it's one of the highest-value things you can do, and it costs nothing because users are free. Give your reps access and let them open any lead to see the full view: every doc, release note, and page that person — or their AI agent — actually read, how far they got, and what they kept coming back to. No traditional CRM can show that, because CRMs sit downstream of the content and never see the consumption itself. Your reps walk into every call already knowing what the prospect understands — and can read the whole buying group, not just one contact.
If users are free, what actually determines my plan?
The audience you nurture. Your plan tracks identified contacts and the emails you send them — the value Leed generates for you — and nothing about your internal headcount.
The part no docs tool offers
The free docs are table stakes. The growth engine is the category of one — it turns documentation into a measurable pipeline channel.
What is the “growth engine”?
It's the monetized layer that turns docs into demand: native lead capture and nurturing, a closed per-reader consumption funnel, reader-level analytics, automated release notes from your issue tracker, and multi-channel and social distribution. Publishing docs is the free half; the growth engine is what makes those docs generate pipeline.
What is the “closed per-reader funnel”?
It's a complete, connected record of exactly what each individual reader — human or AI agent — consumed: which pages, how far they scrolled, what they searched, what an agent pulled. Most stacks show anonymous pageviews on one side and CRM contacts on the other, with a gap in between. Leed closes that gap into one continuous view per reader.
How is this different from Mintlify, GitBook, ReadMe, or Docusaurus?
Those are documentation tools. None of them offer native lead capture, a closed per-reader funnel, or reader-level identity — at any price tier. You'd bolt on a separate analytics tool, a marketing-automation platform, and a scheduler, and still not get the closed loop. Leed is the only platform where docs are the growth engine.
Can I run my whole website on Leed, not just my docs?
Yes — and it's the whole idea. Host your marketing and landing pages, blog, release notes, and documentation on one platform and one domain, so a visitor's presales journey (the pages that generate and capture the lead) and their post-sales experience (the docs and support content they live in afterward) feed the same closed per-reader funnel. Most companies split that across a website builder and a separate docs tool and lose the thread between them — the moment lead-gen becomes support, the trail goes cold. On Leed it's one continuous view of the customer. In fact, the site you're reading right now, marketing pages and docs alike, runs entirely on Leed.
What does the closed loop let me see that a normal analytics tool can't?
A single, complete picture of everything one customer has read and used — tied to their identity, from anonymous first visit through to nurtured contact. A product-analytics tool can't identify the reader; a marketing tool can't see the docs. Leed connects both ends, which is precisely what the assembled stack can't do. We make the full case in why a unified system beats API-integrated tools.
We already manage leads in HubSpot, Marketo, or Customer.io. Do we still need this?
It's not replace-or-nothing — and either way Leed captures a signal those tools can't. Run the growth engine standalone and Leed's native lead capture and nurturing do what you'd otherwise pay a marketing-automation platform to do for your docs. Or keep the tool you have and let Leed feed it the one thing it's blind to: exactly what each lead read in your docs, how far they scrolled, and what their AI agent pulled. HubSpot can tell you an email was opened — it has no idea that account read your pricing and rate-limit pages twice last night. Leed sees that, and on Enterprise it syncs those contacts and their consumption into the CRM you already run.
What are auto release notes?
Leed generates polished release notes straight from your Jira, GitHub, or other issue-tracking system, publishes them, and — on paid plans — turns them into email to your nurtured contacts and posts to your social channels. Your changelog becomes a recurring growth channel instead of a manual chore.
Do I have to use the growth engine?
No. Plenty of teams run beautiful docs entirely on the free plan and never touch it. The growth engine is there for when you want your documentation to actively generate and nurture pipeline — switch it on when you're ready.
Two free MCP servers, built in
Author docs with your own AI, serve them to any agent, and see what those agents actually did — a category-first move, included free on every plan.
What are the two MCP servers?
Operator MCP and Docs MCP. Operator MCP plugs your own Claude (or other MCP client) in to author and manage your docs. Docs MCP serves your docs to AI agents, captures leads through them, and logs every agent tool call as product-feedback analytics. Both are included free.
Are the MCP servers free?
Yes — both, on every plan including free. They're core to how Leed works, not an add-on. AI is how a growing share of your docs get read and written, so we're not going to paywall the connection.
Do I have to set up, host, or maintain the MCP servers?
No — there's nothing to set up. Both servers are live automatically the moment you have docs in Leed: no SDK to wire up, no server to stand up and host, nothing to keep in sync, no config to maintain. Leed runs and scales them for you. You simply point your AI client at Operator MCP, or share the Docs MCP endpoint — the hard part, hosting a live MCP server that always mirrors your latest docs, is already done and included free.
What's the difference between Operator MCP and Docs MCP?
Direction. Operator MCP is inbound to your docs — you point your own AI at Leed to write, edit, and manage content. Docs MCP is outbound from your docs — it exposes your docs to external AI agents, captures the leads those interactions produce, and records what every agent requested.
What is MCP tool-call analytics?
Every time an AI agent calls your Docs MCP — which page it fetched, what it searched, what it couldn't find — Leed logs it. That's a live stream of product feedback: the questions agents (and the humans behind them) are really asking. Seeing your docs through the eyes of the agents consuming them is a category-first capability.
Can AI agents capture leads through my docs?
Yes. When an agent interacts with your docs through Docs MCP, that interaction feeds the same closed funnel as a human reader — so agent-driven demand shows up in your pipeline instead of vanishing into an anonymous API call.
Start in minutes, migrate at your pace
Free signup is instant and requires no migration — bring your existing docs when it suits you.
How fast can I get started?
Minutes. Sign up free, publish a page, point your custom domain at it. No sales call, no credit card, no migration required to begin.
Can I bring my existing docs over?
Yes — and you don't have to move everything to start. Stand up new content on Leed's free plan immediately and migrate existing docs on your own schedule. Enterprise plans include white-glove migration if you'd like help lifting a large docs set across.
Do I need to talk to sales or enter a card to try it?
No. The free plan is self-serve and instant at app.leed.ai. Sales is only there if and when you reach Enterprise scale.
What if I outgrow the free plan?
You upgrade to Starter or Growth in place — same docs, same domain, same team, more contacts and the full growth engine switched on. There's no re-platforming, because you were on the real product the whole time.
Reader-level insight, handled responsibly
We go beyond pageviews to reader identity and scroll depth — all kept first-party — and we're honest about what's shipped today and what's on the roadmap.
Do you meter on traffic or unique visitors?
No — never. Growing readership is the goal, and we're not going to tax it. You'll never hit a traffic wall or a per-visitor bill. The only numbers that move your plan are contacts you nurture and emails you send.
What does reader-level analytics actually track?
On paid plans, Leed connects engagement to reader identity and scroll depth — which pages a known reader read, how far they got, and how that maps to their journey through the funnel. It's the difference between “500 pageviews” and “this account read your pricing and API pages twice this week.” See converting data into actionable metrics for how we turn that into decisions.
How does Leed identify readers, and what about privacy?
Readers become identified contacts through lead-capture forms and the interactions you configure — not through covert tracking. Anonymous readers stay anonymous until they choose to identify; capturing a contact is free, and you only act on those contacts under the consent your forms establish.
Where does my analytics data go? Is it really first-party?
It stays first-party. Leed collects analytics on your own domain — the data is never beaconed off to a third-party analytics host. Not Google Analytics, not Segment, not even leed.ai. That means no third-party tracking cookies, a far simpler consent story, and your readers’ data stays yours.
Do ad blockers break my analytics the way they break Google Analytics?
No — and for docs this matters more than almost anywhere on the web. An estimated 72% of developers run an ad blocker, and ad blockers work by blocking requests to third-party analytics domains — so Google Analytics, Segment, and PostHog silently lose most of a technical audience and report a fraction of reality. Because Leed collects first-party, on your own domain, there is no third-party request to block: you capture the complete picture — effectively 100% of readers, including the engineers every third-party tool misses. For a developer audience, that's the difference between guessing and knowing. We dig into the numbers in The Impact of Ad-Blockers on Business Analytics.
How long is analytics history kept?
History depends on plan: 30 days on Free, 1 year on Starter, 2 years on Growth, and unlimited on Enterprise. As you move up, you keep more of the funnel's history to work with.
Do you have a CRM?
Not yet — and we won't pretend otherwise. A native CRM is on the roadmap (well underway, but not shipped). But there's something worth doing right now: since users are free, bring your sales team in. They can open any lead and see the full view of what that person consumed — every doc, release note, and answer they read, human or AI agent — which a traditional CRM structurally can't show, because it sits disconnected from the content people actually read. Today, Enterprise plans also integrate with your existing CRM so contacts and funnel data flow into the tools you already run. When the built-in CRM ships, it builds directly on that full-consumption view — and we'll say so plainly.
Start free. Pay when docs start working.
Unlimited users, unlimited pages, and your own custom domain — free forever. Capture leads at no cost; upgrade when you're ready to nurture them.