What does a RAG chatbot over our own documents cost?
Retrieval over your own documents, tickets or catalogue costs $8,000 to $25,000 and takes 4-8 weeks. The market range for the same work is $10,000 to $70,000.
Most of the cost is not the model. It is the state of your data: how many formats, how much of it is scanned images, how many documents contradict each other, and whether anyone can say which version is current.
What is included: retrieval across your documents, tickets or catalogue; an evaluation set and a measured baseline for answer quality; guardrails, honest refusals and escalation to a person; a cost and latency budget, with telemetry per request.
What moves the price: how much source data there is, and what state it is in, how many languages it answers in, whether the model may act, or only answer, on-premise or private deployment.
We build an evaluation set before we build the answer quality, because "it feels better now" is not a measurement and cannot be defended to anyone who was not in the room.
Updated: August 15, 2026