HelpDeck

This file records the research behind the HelpDeck assessment, with a confidence level on each claim and what it changed in docs 00–09. It was a light run: 10 web searches and about 20 direct page fetches. It was not a multi-agent, three-vote verification like the CreatorDesk run.

Confidence levels:

• High: read on the primary source (the vendor's own page, or the founder's own post).
• Medium: a secondary write-up quoting the founder, a vendor's comparison of rivals, or a search summary that matches other evidence.
• Low / unverified: a single search summary, or not found.

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10.1 The two proof points in the catalog

R1. HelpKit: the Notion help center that worked (medium–high)

• $10k+ MRR from 400+ customers, solo, by Dominik Sobe (Austria). Third-party write-up dated 5 July 2025. He stopped sharing exact numbers after copycats cloned his landing page. Pricing then started at $19 a month, with value-based deals up to $1,000 a year upfront. Superframeworks
• Early growth came from: manual outreach and demo calls, a free "Simple Notion Table Generator" tool that ranked in search, building in public on X, and word of mouth among indie hackers. (Same source.)
• Trajectory (founder posts on Indie Hackers): $1k MRR on 28 Feb 2022, after ~5 months. $3k on 16 Jun 2022. $5k+ by the end of 2022. IH $1k · IH $3k · 2022 recap (dates from search summaries of these posts; medium).
• Today (helpkit.so, 30 Sept 2026): claims "1000+ happy customers". Notion is its only content source. Features: full-text search, widget, multi-language, analytics, article feedback, gated access, mobile SDK, MCP server. AI add-on: +$49 a month. 7-day trial. Annual billing gives 2 months free. HelpKit · Pricing (high for the features and AI price; the customer count is a company claim).
• Plan prices (from a search summary citing SaaSworthy and HelpKit, July 2026): Starter $15 a site a month (25 articles, 1 seat), Business $31 (100 articles, 5 seats), Professional $63 (1,000 articles, 10 seats). The pricing page didn't render plan prices when fetched. Medium.

R2. NotionForms: the form layer that worked, then moved off Notion (high for 2021–22)

• Launched 13 May 2021, the day Notion's public API opened. MVP in 6 days. 100 users in the first week. Pro $15 a month, later Enterprise $39 (25% of revenue by the milestone). $10k MRR on 1 July 2022. Channels: SEO first (330k+ visitors and 43k+ Google clicks in 12 months), word of mouth, r/Notion, Notion Facebook groups, Product Hunt (#1 of the day on the second launch). No paid ads. A "made with" footer on free forms. Founder post
• Renamed NoteForms. The site says "NoteForms was previously known as NotionForms". The reason (likely trademark) is unverified. Today: Free, Pro $20, Team $49 a month, and a claim of "130,000+ users and companies". It positions itself as "much more powerful than Notion's native forms". NoteForms (high)
• OpnForm is "the same product, but without Notion": open source, built partly to diversify away from Notion platform risk. Hosted plans Free, $25, $67, $220 a month. Self-hosted enterprise licence $1,999 a year. OpnForm pricing (high for prices; the platform-risk motive is from a search summary, medium).
• Indie Hackers, 6 Sept 2024: Julien Nahum at $37k a month across NoteForms, OpnForm and AirFormTable. The split and any effect of Notion Forms are behind a paywall. IH (medium)

10.2 What Notion now offers natively (the key risk)

R3. Notion Forms (high)

• All members on all Notion plans can create and use forms. Conditional logic is Business and Enterprise only. On paid plans, public forms can have Notion branding switched off. Anonymous responses are supported. Notion Help: Forms
• Launched in 2024. The exact month is unverified (one secondary source says August).

R4. Notion Sites (high)

• Free plan: unlimited publishing, 1 notion.site domain, search-engine indexing.
• Paid plans: up to 5 notion.site domains, homepage and site customisation, Google Analytics, and a custom domain add-on at $10 a month, or $8 on annual billing, up to 25 domains. Notion Help: Sites availability and pricing
• Notion's page doesn't mention visitor search, password protection or branding removal. HelpKit (3 Aug 2026) says Sites has "no site search for visitors", "no password protection", no analytics beyond Google Analytics, and indexing that can take up to four weeks. That's a competitor's claim. HelpKit blog (medium)

R5. Notion AI agents (high)

• Custom Agents launched 24 Feb 2026 for Business and Enterprise. They were free in beta, then billed as Notion Credits from 4 May 2026. Use cases shown are internal: Q&A agents (Ramp), and Remote "completely replaced their IT help desk". Notion blog
• Notion 3.7 (15 Sept 2026): Skills, sub-agents, Custom Agents embedded in documents, and an Agent SDK in public beta. Nothing about Sites, Forms or public-facing agents. Release notes

Conclusion: Notion has closed the form gap for free and half-closed the website gap. No native public help center with visitor search was found. That's the gap HelpKit and its clones live in, one Notion release away from closing.

10.3 Competitors

R6. Notion help-center builders (medium; the list comes from HelpKit's own comparison, 3 Aug 2026)

HelpKit, Notion Sites (free), NotionDesk ("closest direct alternative to HelpKit"), Super.so, Notaku ("slowed development pace"), Bullet.so and Potion. Also Feather and Simple.ink (general Notion site builders). HelpKit publishes an "alternative" page against each rival. HelpKit comparison · HelpKit alternatives

R7. Form builders with Notion integrations (high)

Tally: free plan with unlimited forms and submissions (fair use), Notion integration included, Pro $24, Business $74, claims 500,000+ teams. Tally pricing. Plus NoteForms and OpnForm (R2), and Fillout.

R8. Standalone knowledge-base prices (medium: a competing vendor's comparison, "verified May 2026")

GitBook $40, Help Scout Docs $50, Notion $50, Crisp Pro $95, Helpjuice Starter $120, Document360 Professional $149, HubSpot Service Hub Pro $450, Zendesk Suite Growth + AI $695 a month, for a realistic team size. Helpable, 4 May 2026

R9. Confluence publishing apps (high for listing data)

• Scroll Sites for Confluence (K15t): 3,188 installs, 4.9 stars (111 reviews), Platinum partner, Cloud Fortified. Help-center theme, AI search, "LLM-ready", SSO and token access, custom domains, JSM and Zendesk integrations. From $25 a month for up to 10 users. Scroll Viewport reaches end of life on 30 Sept 2026, and users are moved to Scroll Sites. Marketplace listing · K15t
• Refined Sites for Confluence: 2,412 installs, 4.4 stars (63 reviews), Platinum partner, Cloud Fortified, Cloud only. Standard (1 public site, Refined domain) and Advanced (unlimited sites, custom domains). AI search with summaries. Claims 5,000+ organisations. EU data residency. Marketplace listing
• A search summary gave higher install counts (3,413 and 2,521). The listing figures above are used.

R10. Google Docs help-center tools (medium–low)

Kbee (launched 2 Dec 2020, built in under a week, planned $39 a month flat) IH, Spaceli (free) site, HelpSite site. No revenue figures found for any of them.

10.4 Platform economics and base rates

R11. Forge economics (high, reused from the StatusLens research)

• Forge apps keep 100% of Marketplace revenue up to $1M lifetime Forge revenue per partner: "Runs on Atlassian" apps from Oct 2025, standard Forge apps from 1 Jan 2026. Connect apps pay 20%, then 25%. Connect end of support: 31 Jan 2027. See StatusLens research for sources.

R12. Base rates (high that none exists)

• The catalog's verified research found no reliable success base rate for indie SaaS. Every common statistic failed verification. Catalog, Part A
• RevenueCat 2026 (consumer mobile apps): 17.3% reach $1k a month within 2 years, 4.6% reach $10k. Shown for scale only (as cited in DocPress research).

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10.5 Still unverified

1. "Public Pages for Confluence". A search summary says Atlassian launched an app to publish selected Confluence pages as public, SEO-friendly pages. It's unconfirmed whether Atlassian or a vendor built it, and what it costs. If it's native and free, the wedge's entry tier shrinks by about half. Check this first.
2. Churn of Confluence publishing apps. No figure was found. The ≤2% target is an assumption.
3. Whether Forge can serve fast public pages on a custom domain without an external host, and what that means for the "Runs on Atlassian" badge. (The 100% revenue share applies to standard Forge apps too, so the money isn't at risk. The badge is.)
4. HelpKit's current MRR, and whether the Notion help-center niche is growing or shrinking. "1,000+ customers" is a company claim.
5. The exact month Notion Forms launched (2024), and the reason NotionForms was renamed.
6. Marketplace ranking. How much reviews and installs weigh in Atlassian Marketplace search.
7. Vertical help centers. No named product with a revenue figure was found in this run.
8. Other Confluence publishing apps beyond Scroll and Refined. The full Marketplace list wasn't counted.

10.6 What this changed in the assessment