API documentation as a service?

As mentioned API tooling is already very standardized. But I think you‘re maybe onto something. Technical writing is a service is definitely a huge opportunity I see. It‘s a special requested skill that can even work well in a niche.

I would pay someone to write API docs. Not sure how you productize it, but it's definitely something that doesn't get done well enough in most startup environments!

Would be interested! We currently use apiary: https://nixstats.docs.apiary.io/#

I have this pain for multiple clients, openapi is the best for specification, for docs swagger.io/swaggerhub or redoc.ly is the best option right now, stoplight.io just launched with a comprehensive solution, here is why I don't like any of these:

1 They make it difficult to host your own API docs
2 I don't want to deploy my code when I make (just) doc changes - so I don't support docs in the code - also so much more goes into the docs that what devs are willing to put in the code (annotations or the like) - openapi does allow for this
3 Workflow forces their model on you - well you need some sort of model, if not yours then someones
4 Lack of CICD tooling, to generate the full doc set I want a scriptable process, not a UI

Some of the best API docs produced by tooling are highly customized, redoc.ly is about the best I've seen for custom docs, but i'm sure its very expensive (having to hire/contract devs in addition)

[edited - meant to indicate redocly instead of recurly!]

To add to @kylegawley and Swagger.io. They helped create the Open API (current at v3) which has lead to a good amount of different services offering API documentation hosting. It's also some fantastic tools have been created to bundle you docs with your code so they are deployed together. Even better as everything is hosted by yourself and docs are kept in parity with you API.

There is also Read the Docs
which is very popular in the python world, especially within open source as it's free and updates for you when master is updated. It's generally used more for the technical writing side but you can also work API docs into it if you want. You can see an example of this within Read the docs API documentation.

As a side note, if anyone is looking for an OpenAPI V3 compliant online doc editor my favourite so far has been Apicurio studio (no affiliation, just nice to use). There site doesn't look like much from the main page but the actual doc editor is so much nice to use that Swagger, Redoc and quite a few others. I used it as a online editor until I got more used to the Open API v3 syntax and it made it really easy to pickup and learn.

You have some competition

swagger.io
apiary.io