Tagged “cost”
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RAG or a Knowledge Graph?
Graph retrieval answers questions vector search structurally cannot. It also adds an extraction pipeline and a schema you own forever. When it pays.
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Cache-Augmented Generation, and Whether You Qualify
Cache-augmented generation preloads the whole corpus once and reuses it. Four preconditions decide whether you qualify, and most teams fail one.
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When to Bring in Outside Help for Retrieval
Consultants can build a retrieval system faster than you can. Which parts to buy, which never to outsource, and the handover clause that decides it.
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Agentic Retrieval or a Fixed Pipeline?
Letting the model decide how many searches to run trades a predictable bill for a better answer. How to price the variance and where to cap it.
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What a RAG System Actually Costs to Run
The full line-item breakdown: embedding, storage, inference, reindexing — plus the two costs nobody budgets and one that dominates everything.
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RAG Versus Long Context: The Cost Arithmetic
Both architectures work. They have different cost curves, and the crossover depends on three variables you can estimate this afternoon.
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Do You Need Generation, or Just Better Search?
Half the projects that ask for a RAG chatbot would be better served by a search page with good snippets. How to tell which one you have.
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Build or Buy Your Retrieval Stack
What a managed retrieval product actually removes from your plate, what it never removes, and the four questions that decide the call.
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When to Retire a RAG System
The decision nobody plans for. Five signals that a retrieval system has stopped earning its maintenance, and how to shut it down without losing the value.
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Caching and What It Does to a RAG Bill
Four things in a retrieval pipeline can be cached, they save wildly different amounts, and one of them is a correctness risk. Which to do, in order.
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Choosing a Model Size for the Generation Step
In a grounded system the model does less work than you think. How to decide whether you need the expensive one, and how to route so you mostly don't.
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Data Residency as an Architecture Constraint
When documents cannot leave a jurisdiction or a network, the retrieval decision changes shape. What the constraint actually forbids, and what it costs.
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Choosing a Freshness Requirement You Can Afford
How current your index must be is a business decision with an engineering price. Set it deliberately, per document type, before it gets set by default.
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One Index or Many?
Splitting a retrieval index by tenant or topic buys isolation and costs overhead. The three reasons that justify a split, and the ones that don't.
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Self-Hosting Your Embedding Model: When It Pays
The arithmetic for running an open-weight embedding model yourself, the three non-cost reasons that decide it, and why the crossover is far off.
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Do You Need a Vector Database at All?
A dedicated vector store is one of four places embeddings can live. Most teams are below the size where it wins, and the wrong choice adds an operator.
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Embedding Model Lock-In and What Switching Costs
Changing your embedding model means re-embedding everything and re-validating quality. How to price that now so it stays a decision rather than a trap.
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Pricing a RAG Project Before You Have Requirements
How to give a sponsor a defensible number when nobody has decided the scope yet — and which three questions collapse most of the uncertainty.
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The Assistant You Already Pay For
Before you build retrieval, check what your existing software suite already does with your documents. The third option in most build-or-buy debates.
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Scaling Thresholds for a Retrieval System
The four points where a retrieval architecture stops working and has to be redesigned — and how to tell which one you are approaching.
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Corpus Drift and What It Costs You
A retrieval system's quality decays even when nothing in the code changes. Where the decay comes from, and how to price it into the decision up front.
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The Team You Need to Run Retrieval in Production
Retrieval is not a project you staff once. Five capabilities the system needs permanently, and what to do when you can only fund three of them.