Where Does RAG Actually Cost You Money? I Decided to Stop Guessing.
8.2 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth 9
novelty 8
actionability 9
community 5
strategic 6
personal 10
Scored daily by a customisable AI persona to surface the most relevant engineering leadership news.
RAG cost analysis, directly matches reader's AI/data interests.
Summary
A developer's deep-dive into RAG pipeline costs reveals that embedding is not the expensive bottleneck, costing only ~$0.18 per 1,000 pages with OpenAI. The real recurring costs come from vector database infrastructure running 24/7 and LLM inference for reading chunks and generating answers. A dedup check on document changes (80% static, 20% changed) saves significant ingestion costs by avoiding re-processing unchanged content.