A small business or an indie app ends up answering the same fifteen questions by email. How do I cancel. Where is the invoice. Why did sync stop. The usual fix is a help desk with a help center attached: the help center is the part you wanted, the inbox is the part you pay for. The other usual fix is a FAQ page on your website, free and silent the moment someone asks something you did not think of.
This guide is about a third shape. The help center is one long page, written from the answers you already give, hosted on a link. Readers open it and read it, and when the answer is not where they looked, they ask the page. It answers from what is written there, citing the section, and the questions it could not answer come back to you as the list of what to write next. It is a simple help center page for a small business, it is free to start, and it needs no help desk behind it.
What a help center for a small business actually needs
Strip the category down and the list is short. Most knowledge base software, free or not, is built for a support team of ten and sells you categories, roles, review workflows and a chat widget before you have written the second article. For one person with a product, a help center needs five things:
- The answers, in order. Grouped by topic, in plain words, findable by scrolling or by asking. Fifteen to forty answers cover most small products.
- A way to answer the question you did not write. Readers do not phrase things the way you did. "My card got declined" has to land on the billing answer without a heading that says so.
- A record of what people could not find. That list is the only honest roadmap for a help center. Without it you write what you think is missing.
- No account for the reader. Someone with a problem will not register to read your answer.
- No monthly fee until it earns one. A help center for a small business starts at zero tickets a day. It should start at zero dollars too.
Search, a custom domain and a chat widget are not on this list, and the tools that lead with them charge for them.
Which help center tool should a small business pick?
Ranked for a small business or an indie app that wants a help page without Zendesk or Intercom. Prices were checked on each vendor's own pricing page on the day this was written.
- Hostus. Best if the help center fits in one long page (or a folder of pages) and you want readers to ask it. Claude writes the page from your existing answers, Hostus hosts it on a link, and every reader can ask the page a question and get an answer grounded in the page with the section cited, no account. What it could not answer is listed for you. Free plan: 20 documents, 2 MB in total, 20 reader questions a day, no card, no clock.
- Help.center. Pick it if you want a multi-page help site with search and an AI chatbot you can add to your own website as a widget. It has a free plan with 50 AI answers a month; the Business plan is $19 per seat per month with 500.
- HelpSite. Pick it if you want a classic hosted knowledge base with unlimited articles, search and a custom domain from the first plan. There is no free plan: a 14-day trial without a card, then Starter at $490 a year. The AI chatbot that answers from your articles is on the Pro plan.
- HelpKit. Pick it if your answers already live in Notion and you want them published as a help site without leaving it. No free plan, a 7-day trial; the plan prices did not render on their page today, so check their pricing page. The AI chatbot is an add-on at $49 a month on top of any plan.
- GitBook. Pick it if the product is for developers and the help center is really documentation, with Git sync and API docs. The free plan covers one user; the reader-facing AI answers start on the Essential plan at $65 per site per month plus $12 per user per month, billed annually.
- Intercom or Zendesk help center. Pick it if you already pay for their inbox. The help center comes with the suite and the suite is the price; check their pricing page for the current number.
- A FAQ page on your website. Pick it if you have six questions and they never change. Free, on your domain, in Google. It answers nothing it did not anticipate and tells you nothing about what was asked.
How the page answers a question you did not write
Every page published on Hostus carries Ask, and it is on by default. A reader types a question in plain words and gets a short answer written from that page only, with the section it came from cited, so they know where the full answer sits. No account, no login, nothing to install: the page opens from the link on a phone like any web page.
Three rules make it an AI FAQ page you can stand behind rather than a chatbot that improvises:
- It answers only from the page. If the page does not say it, Ask says so instead of guessing. A help center that invents a refund policy is worse than none.
- It cites the section. Every answer names the heading it came from, and the reader can check it.
- It does not transform. It will not do arithmetic on your prices or rewrite your terms. It reports what the page says.
When something on the page is wrong or out of date, the reader can reply on that section. The reply is anchored to the heading, it is private between that reader and you, and you get an email. You answer from the dashboard or through the Claude connector. The reader needs no account for that either.
What it looks like
Here is a help center, live: the help page of a fictional planner app, with Ask on and a few suggested questions to try. Ask it how to cancel, then ask it something it does not cover, and watch the difference: an answer with the section named, or a plain statement that the page does not cover it. The business is made up and the plans, prices and limits on it are illustrative.
Notice what is not there: no search box, because the question box does that job better; no login; no chat bubble pretending to be a person. One page, a short index at the top, headings to scroll to.
The prompt
With the Hostus connector on, this writes the page and publishes it in one turn. Paste your real questions and answers at the end.
Make me a help center page for my planner app from the questions and answers below.
Group them by topic: getting started, account, billing, sync, troubleshooting. Each topic is a section with an id, each question a heading with an id, and the answer right under it in plain words. Put a short index of the topics at the top. No search box: readers will ask the page directly. One HTML file, mobile first.
Publish it to Hostus and give me the link.
[your questions and answers go here]The page is born private: in the Hostus dashboard, switch it to public before you share the link. Ask is already on. Swap the topics for yours. The ids matter: reading by section hangs on them, so you can see which topics readers open and for how long.
Side by side
| Tool | Answers questions you did not write | Shows you what readers could not find | Reader needs an account | Multi-page with search | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostus | Yes, from the page only, section cited | Yes, the unanswered questions are listed for you | No, not to read, ask or reply | No: one page per document, a folder groups pages; Ask replaces search | Yes: 20 documents, 20 reader questions a day, no card |
| Help.center | Yes, AI chatbot and search | Check their site | No | Yes | Yes, 50 AI answers a month; Business $19 per seat per month |
| HelpSite | Yes, AI chatbot on the Pro plan | Check their site | No | Yes, unlimited articles | No; 14-day trial, then $490 a year |
| HelpKit | Yes, as a $49 a month add-on | Check their site | No | Yes, from Notion | No; 7-day trial, check their pricing page |
| GitBook | Yes, from the Essential plan | Check their site | No | Yes | Yes, one user, no reader AI; Essential $65 per site per month |
| Intercom / Zendesk help center | Check their pricing page | Check their site | No | Yes | Check their pricing page |
| FAQ page on your website | No | No | No | One page, browser find | Free |
"Check their site" means we did not verify it on the vendor's page today and would rather say so than guess. The second column is the one that matters: a help center that cannot tell you what people failed to find is one you will never know how to improve.
The unanswered questions are your writing list
Most help centers are written once, from the inside, by the person who already knows the product. The questions readers actually ask are the outside view, and on a Hostus page they are recorded. Every question Ask could not answer from the page sits in a list for you, in the wording the reader used.
That turns maintenance into a loop that takes ten minutes a week:
- Read the unanswered list, in the dashboard or by asking Claude with the connector on. It has a tool for the questions, another for the replies, and one for reading by section.
- Write the missing answer, or ask Claude to draft the section from the question and your reply to it.
- Upload the new version to the same document. The link does not change, and the previous version stays in the history.
Reading by section adds the other half of the picture: which topics readers open and for how long. A billing section that everyone opens and nobody finishes is a billing section to rewrite.
When the help center outgrows one page
One long page holds more than it looks. Forty answers under six topics, with an index at the top, is a normal help center for a small product, and Ask makes length cheap: the reader does not scroll, they ask.
When it does outgrow, split by audience rather than by topic: a public page for everyone, an email-gated page for customers, a private page for your own runbook. Put them in a folder. A folder groups pages and can be shared read-only, but there is no site menu between them: one document is one page, so write the links between pages into the pages themselves.
Readers in other languages are a different case. On a public page a reader can ask for a version of it, including a translation. It is published under the reader's account with a link to the original on top, and it is a transformation of your page with no new numbers in it, so it stays true to what you wrote.
Good to know before you switch
Ask is rate-limited: 20 reader questions a day on the free plan, 200 on paid. The answer comes only from the page; if the page does not say it, Ask says so, and it will not do arithmetic or rewrite your content. One document is one page: a folder groups several, but there is no site menu and no search across them, and Ask works per page.
There is no widget to embed on your own site. The help center is a link you put in your menu or behind the help button in your app; the page cannot be framed inside another site. Public pages carry a noindex, so the help center will not appear in Google, and there is no custom domain: the address is your-slug.hostus.page, not your domain.