Making our Notion Help docs into a proper helpdoc site

We had all our help docs in Notion, but we needed a proper website where customers could read them. We were using HelpKit for this, which could turn our Notion pages into a website and also show help inside our app.

The problem was the price. With the number of docs we had, it would cost us about $80 a month, which felt like too much for us at the time.

We still needed the docs, so I started looking for a cheaper and simpler way to do it. Notion lets you export pages as Markdown files, so I wanted something that could take those files and turn them into a clean help site.

I first looked at Docusaurus, but it used React and felt like more work than we needed. Then I found Zensical, an open-source tool that could turn Markdown files into a documentation website.

Our setup became:

Notion → Markdown → GitHub → Zensical → Help site

It took around two or three days to move everything over and get the site live. We’ve now been using the same setup for more than a year.

It saves us about $1,000 a year, and we don’t have to think about it much after setting it up. The docs live in GitHub, the site is made from simple Markdown files, and anyone can understand how it works.

Why I liked this

It was cheap, simple, and easy to maintain.

For small things like this, I usually prefer a setup that can just keep working without needing much attention.