Build vs buy
Build source-backed answers yourself vs buy Bootstrapware
You already have the pages. A team can embed a box, retrieve a few chunks, and call a model. The honest question is who keeps the answer honest after the first demo.
What a finished version includes
- A visitor widget that shows one complete answer, not a stream
- Citations that resolve to retrieved evidence, not a URL the model invented
- Unanswered, plus the fallback you wrote, when the sources do not support the claim
- Ingestion that canonicalizes, dedupes, versions, and tombstones a deleted page
- A public ask route that cannot spend the month in one scripted burst
- A place to add the missing answer and retest it
- Ongoing docs and dependency maintenance
Those items match the Answers product. The Hosted envelope we publish is 2,500 answers per workspace each month, 1 GiB of knowledge and index, 2,000 sources, 4,000 indexed chunks per app, 20 MiB per file, and 30 days of conversation history. Hitting a ceiling stops that axis. Capacity add-ons are not part of this price.
What buying Bootstrapware includes
- A React widget you can try locally, see the demo
- BYO ($9.99) so knowledge, retrieval, the model, and visitor logs stay on your backend
- Hosted ($19.99) for approved public sources, the index, questions, optional conversations, unanswered items, and citations
- No seat charge. Stack discount on the product list, not on a capacity add-on
Prototype vs the part you keep
| Prototype | What stays yours if you build |
|---|---|
| A text box and a model call | Grounding, citation checks, and a no-answer path that does not guess |
| Paste the docs into a prompt | Crawl limits, canonical URLs, content-hash dedupe, and tombstones |
| A publishable key in the browser | Abuse controls before retrieval or model spend. CORS is not enough |
| “We will add citations later” | Every factual answer has to point at evidence you actually retrieved |
The local demo is free and does not call a model. Pricing is on Answers pricing. This page does not estimate your engineers’ time as a monthly savings number.
FAQ
Should I build this myself?
Build when you want full ownership of retrieval and you will keep the edge cases. Buy when the job is a question widget with citations or an explicit no-answer, and you do not want to own that subsystem.
Why isn't a prompt over the docs enough?
A prompt can sound right without a source. The product work is a citation that resolves to the revision you retrieved, unanswered when the source does not support the claim, and deletion that actually removes that evidence.
What does buying Bootstrapware cost?
Free local and test, BYO $9.99 per workspace per month, Hosted $19.99 per workspace per month, plus the company-wide stack discount. Hosted included amounts are frozen. This page does not convert engineering time into a dollar savings figure.
Related: Chatbase · SiteGPT · DocsBot · All comparisons