Stainless Docs Early Access

If you’ve heard of Stainless, you probably know us as the company that generates SDKs for some of the world’s most ambitious API companies including Anthropic, Cloudflare, OpenAI and many more.

We built our SDK generator because maintaining high-quality API SDKs across multiple programming languages is both hard and expensive, and developers were searching for better options. Using techniques the Stainless team pioneered at Stripe, the SDK generator has solved this problem effectively for many API providers.

Similar problems exist in the world of API documentation. We hear about the same set of docs-related challenges from developers all the time:

• Keeping docs in sync with the actual API implementation is hard.

• Maintaining REST API docs, language-specific SDK docs, and hand-written guide docs is hard, and often spans multiple tools and codebases.

• REST API docs are often written for the HTTP API first. But a Python developer using the Python API SDK cares more about method signatures, input types, and usage patterns in their language.

• Hard trade-offs exist between using a mature docs platform from a vendor, or building a custom docs stack from scratch to preserve control and customization.

• Many documentation tools don't support the full range of valid OpenAPI spec configurations and object schemas

Luckily for developers, amazing tools like Mintlify, ReadMe, and GitBook have made authoring and maintaining docs content much, much better! We recommend them to our customers all the time, and we have lots of ideas for how to connect Stainless SDKs and API tools to these platforms even more seamlessly.

However even with these tools, many problems unique to API developers remain. That's why we built the Stainless Docs Platform.

Introducing the Stainless Docs Platform

The Stainless Docs Platform, built on Astro, provides open-source tools to build high-quality documentation sites that you can customize however you want, and deploy anywhere. You can also manage and host your docs sites with Stainless, and benefit from automatic deployments when your API changes, and rock-solid static site hosting powered by our friends at Cloudflare.

You can sign up for early access to the hosted version today, and check out our "docs for docs" here. You can also watch the video below to see it in action!

Stainless Docs Platform is designed and built by the team behind Stripe's API reference docs and the popular Markdoc content format. We hope that Stainless Docs are particularly effective in three ways:

• Get beautiful docs with modern UX features and AI integrations out-of-the-box

• Unify REST API, SDK, and hand-written docs in one tool, all of which can stay in sync with an OpenAPI spec

• Provide full control to customize anything and deploy anywhere with open-source tools

While the product is still very early (and we expect it will change quite a bit more based on your feedback), we've made enough progress toward these goals where we wanted to share Stainless Docs Platform with the community to see what you think. Here's a quick overview of the platform today.

Docs that feel as good to use as your API

Every Stainless Docs site comes with a clean, modern default theme and a UI component library that anticipates common documentation use cases. Sites are statically rendered with minimal JavaScript by default, enabling great performance for web browsers and bots.

You can also generate all docs pages in lightweight, LLM-friendly Markdown text. Just append .md to any route, making your content equally accessible to humans and machines.

Search in Stainless Docs delivers precise, structured results by indexing your SDK metadata instead of scraped HTML. It understands your API, letting users filter by language, resource, or method. The system builds on the same search expertise our team developed while working on docs platforms at Stripe.

We knew we wanted great docs for our new API, but didn’t know it was only going to take 2 days thanks to Stainless.

— Batuhan İçöz, Beeper

SDK-native docs, kept automatically in sync

Powered by your OpenAPI spec, Stainless keeps every SDK example, API reference, and prose section automatically in sync as your API evolves. Snippets update with each release, so code examples never drift and your team never has to manually fix outdated parameters or signatures.

Prose and narrative docs alongside API docs

Beyond the autogenerated reference, Stainless makes it easy to write and maintain everything else that brings your API to life, like your quick start, tutorials, and conceptual docs. You can author content in Markdown, MDX, or Markdoc, extend it with custom components, and manage it all in your own GitHub repo, so updating your docs feels like shipping code.

Open-source tools let you customize anything, deploy anywhere

While Stainless Docs works great out of the box, it’s also built for teams that want full control. Each site is an Astro project in a dedicated GitHub repo, giving you direct access to every line of code. You can add new pages, override components, customize layouts, or integrate your favorite frontend frameworks like React, Vue, or Svelte.

When you host with Stainless, you get reliability baked in. Sites run on Cloudflare’s global edge network, with free custom domains, automatic SSL, and sub-100 ms response times worldwide. Deploys are instant, backed by global caching, and scale automatically without configuration—so your docs stay fast and available no matter where your users are.

If you prefer full control, Stainless Docs can also be self-hosted anywhere. Deploy as a static site or use server-side rendering with prebuilt adapters for platforms like Vercel, Fly.io, or Deno. Either way, your docs live in a GitHub repo you own, versioned and deployed just like production code.

Built on the Stainless Docs Platform

We’ve been lucky to work with some incredible developer teams already using the Stainless Docs Platform to power their documentation sites. Check out the links below to see what's possible today.

We can’t wait to see what you document!

Even if you aren’t a Stainless user yet, you can apply for early access here. We will be letting users in as quickly as we can, so we hope you’re excited to build. Note that before the 1.0 release of Stainless Docs Platform, we expect that API shapes, folder structures, names, and other interfaces will change significantly.

Happy documenting!