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You’re looking at KnowledgeOwl and thinking $100/month sounds reasonable for knowledge base software. Then you realize that’s for one author with no custom domain. Add a second author, want your own URL, and suddenly you’re at $275/month. Add a third author and a separate internal wiki? $350/month.
KnowledgeOwl’s “pay for authors, not readers” model sounds straightforward until you work through the math. Let me save you the spreadsheet.
The Four Tiers
| Plan | Price | Articles | AI Credits/mo | Custom Domain | API | SSO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $100/mo | 1,000 | 25 | No | No | No |
| Pro | $250/mo | 2,500 | 100 | Yes | Yes | No |
| Business | $500/mo | 5,000 | 250 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise | $1,125+/mo | Custom | 1,000+ | Yes | Yes | Yes |
30-day free trial, no credit card required.
Every plan includes 1 author and 1 knowledge base. Readers are unlimited on all tiers (genuinely good). Annual billing saves 10%, two-year saves 15%, three-year saves 20%. Nonprofits and B Corps get 25% off.
Basic: $100/month
One author. One knowledge base. No custom domain (you’re stuck with yourcompany.knowledgeowl.com). No API. No code-level customization. 25 AI credits that’ll last you maybe a day if you turn on the chatbot.
You do get the article editor, reader group permissions (KnowledgeOwl’s best feature), article versioning, keyword search, and basic content organization. It works. It’s just expensive for what it is.
For context: HelpDocs starts at $49/month with a custom domain included. GitBook Premium is $65/month. Ferndesk starts at $39/month with AI on every plan. KnowledgeOwl’s Basic is the priciest entry point in the category for the least features.
Pro: $250/month
This is where KnowledgeOwl actually becomes useful for a real team. Custom domain, API access, HTML/CSS/JS customization, webhooks, semantic search, and 100 AI credits per month. If you’re evaluating KnowledgeOwl seriously, this is probably the plan you’d buy, which means the real starting price is $250, not $100.
The jump from Basic to Pro gets you everything the Basic plan gatekeeps: your own domain, the ability to integrate with other tools, and enough AI credits to actually use the chatbot for a few days each month.
One author on Pro: $250/month. Three authors on Pro: $300/month. Five authors on Pro: $350/month.
Business: $500/month
The compliance tier. SSO (SAML), HIPAA BAA, GDPR tools, priority support, and a 99.5% SLA. Plus 5,000 article capacity and 250 AI credits. If your security team requires SSO or your industry requires HIPAA, you’re on this plan whether you want to be or not.
Here’s what a real team costs on Business:
| Team Setup | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 5 authors, 1 KB | $600/mo | $7,200/yr |
| 5 authors, 2 KBs | $650/mo | $7,800/yr |
| 10 authors, 2 KBs | $775/mo | $9,300/yr |
| 15 authors, 3 KBs | $950/mo | $11,400/yr |
| 20 authors, 3 KBs | $1,075/mo | $12,900/yr |
At 20 authors with 3 knowledge bases, you’re spending nearly $13K/year on a documentation tool that still requires you to manually write and maintain every article.
Enterprise: $1,125+/month
Dedicated account manager, 99.9% SLA, custom contract terms, 1,000+ AI credits, security assessments included (only free for annual subscribers otherwise). Pricing scales from $1,125/month based on your specific needs.
Where the Money Really Goes
Per-Author Fees ($25/month each)
This is where the model gets expensive quietly. Each author beyond the first adds $25/month. It doesn’t sound like much until you do the multiplication:
| Authors | Monthly Add-on | Annual Add-on |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | $50/mo | $600/yr |
| 5 | $100/mo | $1,200/yr |
| 10 | $225/mo | $2,700/yr |
| 20 | $475/mo | $5,700/yr |
A 20-person team on the Pro plan pays $250 (base) + $475 (authors) = $725/month before you even think about multiple knowledge bases.
Per-Knowledge Base Fees ($50/month each)
Want separate docs for customers, internal team, and partners? That’s 3 knowledge bases. Two extra at $50/month each = $100/month added to your bill, or $1,200/year.
AI Credits That Don’t Roll Over
The AI credit system is the most frustrating part of KnowledgeOwl’s pricing. Each plan gets a fixed monthly allocation of credits that don’t roll over. Unused credits disappear at the end of each billing cycle. You can buy extra credits if you run out, but there’s no way to accumulate a buffer from quiet months.
What does 25 credits (Basic plan) actually get you? If your help center gets any real traffic and you’ve enabled the chatbot, those credits can be gone in a day or two. You either live without AI features for most of the month, or you upgrade to a plan that costs 2.5x more.
Even the Business plan’s 250 credits has a ceiling. If you have a popular help center with thousands of monthly visitors hitting the chatbot, you’ll feel it.
Three Scenarios, Three Price Tags
Solo founder building a customer help center:
You need a custom domain, so Basic is out. Pro plan, single author: $250/month, or $3,000/year. That’s what it costs to have one person write docs on KnowledgeOwl with a professional URL.
Compare: HelpDocs runs $588/year for the same use case. Ferndesk runs $468/year with AI included.
Support team of 5, two knowledge bases (customer docs + internal wiki):
Business plan (you probably need SSO): $500 + 4 extra authors ($100) + 1 extra KB ($50) = $650/month, or $7,800/year.
Growing company, 15 authors across 3 knowledge bases:
Business plan: $500 + 14 extra authors ($350) + 2 extra KBs ($100) = $950/month, or $11,400/year.
What You Get For That Money
KnowledgeOwl isn’t a bad product. The reader group permissions are genuinely best-in-class: segment your audience and show different content to different groups without maintaining separate knowledge bases. Users consistently call this the standout feature.
The semantic search (Pro and above) understands intent, handles typos, and finds relevant articles without exact keyword matches. It’s well-implemented.
The support is personal. Seven employees means you talk to real humans who know the product deeply. Feature requests actually influence the roadmap. You won’t get this from Zendesk.
The editorial workflow is clean: draft, review, publish statuses with versioning and category management. Simple and functional.
What You Don’t Get
No automatic documentation updates. Your product changes, your docs don’t, and KnowledgeOwl won’t notice or help. You find the stale articles yourself or wait for customer complaints.
No codebase integration. GitHub and your knowledge base are separate worlds. Documentation drift is invisible.
No support ticket analysis. You can’t connect your helpdesk to automatically identify what customers keep asking about.
No real-time collaboration. Two editors, same article, last save wins. The other person’s work is gone.
No SOC 2. If your buyers require it (and enterprise buyers increasingly do), KnowledgeOwl can’t check that box.
For more on the feature gaps, see our full KnowledgeOwl review.
When This Pricing Works
If you’re a single author who needs audience segmentation and values supporting a bootstrapped company, KnowledgeOwl is reasonable on the Pro plan. If you’re a nonprofit getting 25% off, even better. The product is simple, the support is great, and the reader groups are genuinely useful.
When It Doesn’t
The pricing falls apart at scale. A 10-person team with compliance needs is spending $9K+/year on software that can’t keep docs current automatically. The per-author model means every new hire who touches documentation adds to the bill. And the AI credit system means you’re paying for AI features you can’t fully use.
For pricing comparisons: Helpjuice pricing, HelpDocs pricing, GitBook pricing, Mintlify pricing, Help Scout pricing.
How Ferndesk Compares
| Feature | KnowledgeOwl (Pro) | Ferndesk (Scale) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $250/mo (1 author) | $99/month |
| 5 team members | $350/mo total | $99/mo (included) |
| AI features | 100 credits/month | Unlimited |
| Custom domain | Included | Included |
| Auto content updates | No | Yes (codebase sync) |
| Support ticket analysis | No | 5,000 tickets/month |
| Content auditing | No | Weekly, automated |
| Additional KBs | $50/month each | Included |
| Per-author fees | $25/month each | None |
The cost difference is straightforward. Five people on KnowledgeOwl Pro: $4,200/year. Five people on Ferndesk Scale: $1,188/year. That’s $3,012/year back in your budget.
But the bigger difference isn’t price, it’s what the AI actually does. KnowledgeOwl’s AI helps you write articles (on a credit meter). Ferndesk’s AI agent maintains your entire help center: it reads your codebase, watches your support tickets, audits content weekly, and drafts updates for your approval. You stop worrying about whether your docs are current because something else is watching.
No per-author fees. No credit limits. No surprise add-ons. Documentation that actually keeps up with your product.
Bottom Line
KnowledgeOwl’s pricing is deceptive. “Pay for authors, not readers” sounds simple, but the per-author fees, per-KB fees, AI credit caps, and feature-gating make the real cost 2-4x the base price for most teams. A solo author pays $3K/year. A small team pays $7-9K/year. A mid-size team can easily cross $11K/year.
For that money, you get a solid traditional knowledge base with some AI writing help. You don’t get documentation that maintains itself, and you don’t get AI without a credit meter.
If you want a help center that stays current without the manual grind, Ferndesk starts at $39/month. No per-seat pricing, no credit limits, and an AI agent that does the maintenance work so you can build product instead of writing docs.
