Why we don't meter documentation
A product decision that costs us money and we would make again. Metering docs creates exactly the wrong incentive.
Written guides are unlimited on every DemoRiff plan, including the free one. People ask us fairly often whether that is a mistake.
The argument for metering
It is not a bad argument. Generating a guide costs us something — transcription, screenshot extraction, annotation, storage, serving. Multiply by unlimited usage and the number stops being trivially small. Every competitor in this category meters something here.
The argument against
Metering creates a decision. Every time someone considers documenting something, they now have to evaluate whether this particular process is worth spending a unit on.
The problem is that the documentation most worth having is exactly the documentation that loses that evaluation. Nobody hesitates to document the primary onboarding flow. What does not get written is the obscure edge case that affects four percent of customers, the workaround for the known bug, the thing that only comes up when someone is migrating from a competitor.
“The marginal article is almost always worth more to the customer than it costs us to generate. Pricing that discourages the marginal article is pricing against the product's own purpose.”
The second-order effect
There is a business argument too, and it is not altruistic. Teams whose documentation is complete have lower support costs, better activation and better retention — with us as well as with their own customers. A customer whose help center is comprehensive is a customer who stays.
Metering video makes sense because rendering is genuinely expensive and the cost scales with output length in a way customers can reason about. Metering documentation does not, so we do not.
What this means in practice
Record a silent walkthrough of anything, any number of times, on any plan, and publish the resulting article. No credits, no quota, no upgrade prompt.