How Much Does a RAG Chatbot Cost in 2025? Complete Pricing Guide

Published on December 16, 2025 by Syed Ali Hassan

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) chatbots are rapidly becoming the standard for accurate, source-grounded customer support and internal assistance. This guide breaks down typical pricing ranges, key cost drivers, ROI, and when to choose RAG over fully fine-tuned LLMs.

What Is a RAG Chatbot?

A RAG chatbot combines a language model with a retrieval layer that searches your own documents, FAQs, product manuals, and knowledge bases. The assistant cites sources, reduces hallucinations, and stays aligned with your policies.

Pricing Tiers

• Starter (£5k–£10k): Single corpus, FAQ ingestion, basic UI, analytics.
• Growth (£15k–£30k): Multi-corpus (FAQ + PDFs + blog), SSO, CRM integration, workflows.
• Enterprise (£50k+): Advanced security, on-prem options, compliance, SLA, multi-language.

Cost Drivers

• Data volume and format (PDFs, HTML, spreadsheets).
• Integrations (CRM, ticketing, BI, Slack, Teams).
• Security and compliance requirements (PII, audit trails).
• Latency and scale (concurrency, global regions).

ROI Example

Teams typically see 30–60% support deflection and 20–40% efficiency gains. A £15k build can save £50k+ annually in reduced manual effort and faster resolutions.

Get a Custom Quote

Ready to estimate your project? Get a custom quote or explore our solutions.