Generic chatbots make things up because they don't know your business. A RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) chatbot fixes that: your policies, PDFs, help center, product data and internal wiki become its source of truth, so every answer is grounded in your real information and points back to the document it came from.
What the RAG chatbot build includes
- Data ingestion & embedding — docs, PDFs, databases, help center, websites
- RAG pipeline with evals — measured accuracy, not vibes
- Guardrails & citations — safe, sourced answers that reduce hallucination
- Chat widget or API — embedded on your site or wired into your product, on your branding
- Monitoring & deployment — live, observable, and maintained
A chatbot for your internal knowledge base, or for your customers
Two shapes cover most builds. An internal assistant answers staff questions from your own policies, contracts and wiki. A customer-facing one handles the repetitive support questions on your site or inside your product. If your team keeps answering the same questions, that is the signal. Customer-facing assistants need more guardrail and evaluation work, because a wrong answer reaches a customer instead of a colleague.
For how each stage works (ingestion, chunking, retrieval, evals and citations), read custom RAG development: what a production build includes.
What a RAG chatbot costs
The AI Assistant package starts at $8,000 for about four weeks. Messy source data, customer-facing use, integrations and regulated subject matter all add to that. See how much a RAG chatbot costs, and what moves the price, or run your own answers through the AI development cost calculator.
Do you need RAG or fine-tuning?
For chatbots that need to know your facts, the answer is almost always RAG — it's cheaper, updates instantly, and cites sources. We explain the trade-offs in RAG vs fine-tuning.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build an AI chatbot?
A production RAG chatbot typically ships in about 30 days, depending on how messy the source data is.
What does it cost?
RAG chatbot builds start at $8,000, fixed price. See the RAG chatbot cost breakdown, or how much it costs to build an AI app for all three packages.
Which models do you use?
OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or open-source models — we pick what best fits your accuracy, privacy, and cost needs.
Related services: AI development · AI MVP development · data pipeline services.