A single codebase, thousands of customer domains

Mintlify provides a platform for building public documentation — help guides, tutorials, and API references — that can be used as-is or deeply customized. As the startup grew, its architecture had to keep pace. The original setup, a static Next.js app cloned per customer, lacked multitenancy and quickly became a bottleneck. The team moved to a single unified codebase on Vercel, letting one project serve documentation across many subdomains and custom domains.

That shift moved hosting, scaling, and infrastructure management off the Mintlify team's plate. The platform now supports roughly 2,500 active custom domains, with SSL certificates and domain assignment handled programmatically through Vercel's API. For the Mintlify team, a connected custom domain is a strong signal of engagement — it shows a user is invested in the docs — so removing friction from that setup matters.

“Someone adding a custom domain means they're truly invested in using our docs. Vercel's ability to manage custom domains and SSL certificates has been a major time-saver for the Mintlify team.”

Hahnbee Lee

Why the pieces fit

Three aspects of the Vercel and Next.js stack do the heavy lifting for Mintlify:

  • Scale: A single Vercel project handles multiple customers across thousands of custom domains and terabytes of documentation.
  • Performance: The global edge network paired with Next.js keeps documentation fast. Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) propagates doc updates immediately without a full rebuild.
  • Automation: The Vercel API handles custom domain configuration and simplifies SSL certificate issuance, keeping manual infrastructure work out of the daily flow.

“Mintlify would not have been able to scale as quickly as it has without Next.js and Vercel. Multi-tenancy and all the custom domains connecting to one vercel project is so epic.”

Hahnbee Lee

Looking ahead, Mintlify plans to extend its use of Vercel's infrastructure, including migrating its dashboard for better performance. That frees the team to focus on features rather than the underlying plumbing of documentation hosting.