The Hidden Cost of RAG: Why Your Vector Search Bill Is About to Surprise You
I heard about a team that developed a RAG demo for internal document search. Several hundred PDFs, a handful of people testing it. The monthly cost was $340. Everyone was so excited, it was signed off by leadership and shipped to production.
The bill was $61,000 per month six months later.
No one did anything out of the ordinary. No one has multiplied the number of documents by a factor of 100 in a single night. What happened is what happens with almost every RAG system after it moves out of the demo phase: The cost math that seemed to work at small scale doesn't work when real traffic and a growing corpus appear. The part that surprises most teams is not the LLM bill — everybody plans for that one. It's the vector database lying beneath it.
The bill nobody models correctly
Most teams have a pretty good estimate...
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