How much does
RAG system
cost in 2026?
RAG system costs depend on corpus size, retrieval rigor, and evals.
What you get at each tier.
Demo ($3k-10k)
$3,000-$10,000
What you get: A working RAG prototype with basic vector search.
Trade-offs: Hybrid search, reranking, evals.
Mid-market ($15k-50k)
$15,000-$50,000
What you get: Production RAG with hybrid search, reranker, basic evals, and observability.
Trade-offs: Custom embeddings, deep evals, regulated-industry work.
Senior studio ($50k-150k)
$50,000-$150,000
What you get: Production RAG with custom embeddings, deep evals, citation traceability, and post-launch support.
Trade-offs: Speed.
Enterprise ($150k-500k+)
$150,000-$500,000+
What you get: Full RAG with compliance, multi-tenant, ongoing partnership.
Trade-offs: Budget.
Don't forget the add-ons.
- Embedding API fees
- Vector database (pgvector or Pinecone)
- Reranker (Cohere or open-source)
- LLM API fees for generation
- Eval cycle costs
What drives cost most
- Corpus size
- Retrieval complexity
- Evals rigor
- Citation requirements
- Compliance
Bands aren't
quotes.
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Default RAG stack uses pgvector + Cohere Rerank + Claude.