I built a help center in a week

I built a complete help center platform in a week. The video below is a quick look at a production-ready help center with an AI-first authoring experience.

So why did I build it?

I try to run my department like a startup where every dollar counts. When I looked into help center tools, most priced between $500 and $1,500 a month. The features often didn't justify the cost. Many open-source options also lacked the customization I wanted and didn't have an AI driven approach.

Even the expensive tools didn't always address the main issue, which is that it's costly to write the content.

So, I spent a week and built my own documentation platform.

Here's what it offers:

• AI content generation. You can upload PRDs, specs, changelogs, or other artifacts, or use the built-in connectors to pull them directly from Jira, Confluence, and Slack. Write a few sentences about the tone and audience, then it generates the content. You'll get around 10 polished help articles in about 60 seconds.
• Full editorial workflow. Draft, review, approve, publish, with role-based access for owners, admins, authors, and reviewers.
• Fully branded help center. It features custom theming with an AI theme helper that lets you adjust colors, readability, and presets in real time.
• AI chat assistant. This is embedded in every article, allowing customers to ask questions in plain language and receive cited answers from your documents.
• Search gap detection. It tracks what customers are searching for but not finding. Instead of guessing what to write next, you'll know the gaps that exist.
• Team management. Invite users with specific roles and track their activities. See which articles they're working on in real time.
• Analytics. It shows articles created, published, and trends over time.

I opted for a database approach instead of docs-as-code. I've used docs-as-code before and generally love it, but sometimes it can be challenging to manage all the conflicts and find folks comfortable in that environment. A database approach eliminates those issues. Any author can jump in and start writing right away.

I'll make a deep dive video for this tomorrow but for now, here's a look into what it can do. I called the product Loderra -- mostly because the domain name was available and the name was kinda short.