1.1 The two plugins

Living Manual ships as a free core plugin and a paid add-on. Living Manual is the free core. It builds the browsable, searchable manual. It needs no API key, makes no external service call to do its work, and costs nothing. Everything in this section of the documentation applies to it. Living Manual Pro is the add-on. It adds the AI docent, an AI-enhanced ingest that builds a knowledge graph from your document, an insights dashboard that analyzes what readers ask, and licensing. It requires the free core to be installed and active, and it requires your own Anthropic API key. The split is real, not a trial. The free core is a complete product on its own: if you never install Pro, you still get a manual website with working search.