What’s Included
Help employees rapidly find reliable internal information through grounded AI answers and search.
Key Features
- Conversational AI assistant with cited, source-grounded answers and a searchable results list.
- Five API integrations spanning HR, SharePoint-style knowledge bases, project management, and Slack.
- Ingestion for PDFs, spreadsheets, and wiki content.
- Hybrid vector and BM25 retrieval with re-ranking and GraphRAG-style entity linking.
- OpenAI-based RAG answer generation.
- Query-time enforcement of existing source-system user and group permissions.
- Self-serve connection setup, sync-status visibility, and ingestion troubleshooting.
Platforms
- English-only web application hosted in the United States.
Who It’s For
- Employees who search and ask questions about company knowledge.
- Administrators who configure connections, monitor syncs, troubleshoot ingestion, and manage governance.
Out of Scope for This MVP
- Target US mid-market customers and host customer data in the United States.
- Support a SOC 2 and HIPAA-ready security and compliance posture.
- Preserve source-system permissions so users only retrieve content they are authorized to access.
- The MVP prioritizes a practical shared knowledge portal rather than a broad enterprise governance suite.
- Detailed audit analytics and advanced content-control dashboards are deferred unless needed for the initial launch.
Full Cost Breakdown
Every line item below is a real feature from the PRD, priced in hours and USD at our AI-accelerated delivery rate. Totals are rounded to the nearest $10.
| Feature | Category | Hours | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| The portal shall allow employees to search the shared knowledge base using keywords and phrases. | Search | 7 | $390 |
| The portal shall allow employees to ask questions in natural language and receive answers grounded in authorized internal content. | Question Answering | 17 | $940 |
| The portal shall display the internal sources supporting each answer. | Source Attribution | 5 | $280 |
| The portal shall enforce source-system user and group permissions when processing searches and generating answers. | Authorization | 15 | $830 |
| The portal shall ingest and index PDFs, spreadsheets, and wiki content for search and question answering. | Content Ingestion | 19 | $1,050 |
| The portal shall allow administrators to connect Google Drive as a knowledge source. | Google Drive Integration | 10 | $550 |
| The portal shall allow administrators to configure, authenticate, manage, and disconnect the Google Drive connection. | Integration Administration | 12 | $660 |
| The portal shall synchronize approved Google Drive content and make synchronization status visible to administrators. | Synchronization | 14 | $770 |
| The portal shall allow administrators to troubleshoot Google Drive ingestion failures by retrying, re-running, correcting configuration, and resuming synchronization. | Ingestion Operations | 15 | $830 |
| The portal shall record administrative, integration, synchronization, access, and security-relevant events in an audit trail. | Audit Administration | 12 | $660 |
| Delivery Overhead | |||
| Planning | 32 | $1,760 | |
| Project Management | 25 | $1,380 | |
| Testing | 15 | $830 | |
| DevOps | 12 | $660 | |
| Design & Frontend Build | 38 | $2,090 | |
| AI Tokens | 0 | $430 | |
| Security | 15 | $830 | |
| Risk (10% Contingency) | 27 | $1,490 | |
| Total | 290 | $16,450 | |
Estimate Assumptions
- Estimates cover application development and integration work, excluding NFR overhead, infrastructure operations, compliance certification, and vendor fees.
- Supabase Auth, PostgreSQL, object storage, a US-hosted vector store, and OpenAI Responses API access are available and configured.
- Google Drive OAuth consent, API quotas, permission metadata, and customer administrator access are available.
- Google Drive remains authoritative for source permissions, with sufficient metadata to filter retrieval at query time.
- PDF, spreadsheet, and wiki parsing uses existing libraries or services; advanced OCR and unsupported formats are excluded.
- Background workers or scheduled jobs are available for asynchronous synchronization and document processing.
- The portal uses the specified Next.js, Supabase, REST API, and Vercel stack with shared tenant and role primitives.
- Audit retention, export, deletion, and detailed compliance evidence requirements are not yet specified.
Risks That Could Change This
- Google Drive API quotas, permission propagation, and shared-drive behavior may increase synchronization and authorization effort.
- Permission-aware retrieval can leak content if metadata is stale or filtering is inconsistently applied across search and answer paths.
- Document parsing quality, spreadsheet structure, and wiki export formats may require format-specific remediation.
- Answer grounding and citation quality may require prompt, chunking, model, and evaluation iterations beyond the base estimate.
- Retry and resumability behavior may be difficult to validate without defined failure scenarios and recovery objectives.
User Stories
The full set of user stories behind this estimate, grouped by the person using the app.
As an employee, I want to search the shared knowledge portal so that I can quickly find relevant company information.
English-only web experience for US-hosted mid-market customers.
As an employee, I want to ask questions in natural language and receive source-grounded answers so that I can understand internal information without searching multiple systems.
Answers should identify the supporting internal sources.
As an employee, I want to view the sources supporting an answer so that I can verify the information and investigate further.
Sources are limited to content the employee is authorized to access.
As an employee, I want search and answer results to respect my existing source-system permissions so that I do not retrieve unauthorized company information.
Access enforcement occurs at query time and preserves source-system user and group permissions.
As an employee, I want to find information from documents and wiki content so that knowledge stored in different formats is available in one place.
Initial ingestion supports PDFs, spreadsheets, and wiki content.
As an administrator, I want to connect Google Drive so that company knowledge can be included in the shared portal.
The initial release supports Google Drive only. HR, SharePoint-style knowledge bases, project management systems, and Slack are deferred.
As an administrator, I want to configure and manage the Google Drive connection so that the portal can access the intended company knowledge source.
Self-serve setup is preferred; standard authentication and privacy controls are assumed. Other integrations are deferred from the initial release.
As an administrator, I want to view Google Drive synchronization status so that I know whether the connected knowledge source is current.
Status should make successful, in-progress, and failed Google Drive synchronization states understandable.
As an administrator, I want to troubleshoot Google Drive ingestion problems so that failed or incomplete knowledge updates can be resolved.
Remediation includes retrying or re-running jobs, correcting connection or ingestion configuration, and resuming synchronization.
As an administrator, I want customer knowledge data handled with audit-ready security controls so that the organization can support SOC 2 and HIPAA-ready deployments.
SOC 2-oriented controls apply to all deployments. HIPAA-ready safeguards are enabled for customers handling HIPAA-sensitive data. Customer data is hosted in the United States.
Requirements
Functional and non-functional requirements the estimate above is priced against.
The portal shall allow employees to search the shared knowledge base using keywords and phrases.
English-only web experience for US-hosted mid-market customers.
The portal shall allow employees to ask questions in natural language and receive answers grounded in authorized internal content.
Answers must be generated from indexed company knowledge.
The portal shall display the internal sources supporting each answer.
Users must be able to verify answer content and investigate further.
The portal shall enforce source-system user and group permissions when processing searches and generating answers.
Unauthorized content shall not appear in results, answers, or source references.
The portal shall ingest and index PDFs, spreadsheets, and wiki content for search and question answering.
Initial content types are limited to the approved formats.
The portal shall allow administrators to connect Google Drive as a knowledge source.
Google Drive is the only integration required for the initial release.
The portal shall allow administrators to configure, authenticate, manage, and disconnect the Google Drive connection.
Self-service administration is preferred.
The portal shall synchronize approved Google Drive content and make synchronization status visible to administrators.
Status shall identify successful, in-progress, and failed synchronization states.
The portal shall allow administrators to troubleshoot Google Drive ingestion failures by retrying, re-running, correcting configuration, and resuming synchronization.
Error information must support administrator remediation.
The portal shall record administrative, integration, synchronization, access, and security-relevant events in an audit trail.
Audit records must support customer compliance reviews.
The system shall protect customer knowledge and enforce least-privilege access across users, administrators, integrations, and stored data.
Security controls apply to all deployments.
The system shall provide audit-ready security controls and evidence suitable for SOC 2-oriented deployments.
SOC 2 readiness does not imply a certification requirement.
The system shall support HIPAA-ready safeguards for customers handling HIPAA-sensitive data.
HIPAA safeguards are enabled where applicable to the customer deployment.
Customer data, indexed content, generated answers, and audit records shall be hosted in the United States.
US hosting is required for the initial target market.
The system shall provide responsive search and answer interactions, with standard API responses targeted below 200 milliseconds where applicable.
End-to-end answer generation latency may vary based on retrieval and model processing.
The system shall preserve synchronization integrity and support recovery from interrupted or failed Google Drive ingestion jobs.
Jobs must expose clear state and avoid silent data loss.
The system shall provide monitoring, logging, and performance visibility for portal requests, answer generation, integrations, and synchronization jobs.
Operational telemetry must support diagnosis and service management.
The system shall support growth in employees, indexed documents, search traffic, and synchronization workload for mid-market customers.
Capacity targets and tenant limits require validation during estimation.
Requirements Assumptions
- The initial release is a web portal, not a mobile or app-store application.
- Google Drive is the only external integration in scope for the initial release.
- HR systems, SharePoint-style knowledge bases, project management systems, and Slack are deferred.
- Standard authentication and customer identity-management capabilities are available or provided separately.
- Google Drive permissions remain the authoritative source for content access decisions.
- The initial user experience is English-only.
- Customer-specific retention, deletion, backup, disaster-recovery, and service-level targets are not yet defined.
- HIPAA-ready deployment may require customer configuration, contractual terms, and operational procedures beyond the product features.
- No document authoring, workflow approval, payments, or knowledge-content editing features are in scope.
- Answer quality, supported file-size limits, synchronization frequency, throughput targets, and concurrency limits require estimation assumptions or later confirmation.
Technical Specification
The reference architecture and stack this estimate is built on.
Implement the employee portal and administrator console as a responsive Next.js application using React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui.
English-only web experience; no mobile application is included in the initial release.
Use Supabase Auth with JWT-based sessions and OAuth 2.0-compatible integration over HTTPS/TLS 1.2 or later.
SSO and customer identity-provider integration depend on the selected deployment configuration.
Enforce tenant isolation, employee and administrator roles, least-privilege access, and source-system user/group permissions during retrieval and answer generation.
Google Drive permissions remain authoritative; unauthorized content must be excluded from results and citations.
Use REST APIs with optional Supabase Edge Functions for portal operations, administration, Google Drive integration, synchronization workflows, and answer generation.
API contracts, background-job orchestration, rate limits, and concurrency targets require estimation.
Use managed PostgreSQL through Supabase for tenants, users, configuration, metadata, synchronization state, audit records, and application data; use object storage for source files and a RAG vector store for indexed content.
Stored content, embeddings, answers, and audit records must remain hosted in the United States.
Use the OpenAI Responses API with retrieval over authorized document and wiki chunks; return source-grounded answers with references to permitted internal sources.
Answer quality, model selection, token limits, chunking, and prompt policies require estimation assumptions.
Provide administrator-managed Google Drive OAuth connection, configuration, content discovery, permission-aware ingestion, synchronization status, retries, resumability, and failure remediation.
The initial release supports Google Drive only; other knowledge integrations are deferred.
Provide an administrator UI for connection management, synchronization monitoring, error remediation, tenant configuration, and audit-trail review.
Audit events include administrative, integration, synchronization, access, and security-relevant actions.
Host the web application and admin console on Vercel and backend data services on Supabase, configured for United States data residency; maintain development, staging, and production environments.
Provider region availability, tenant isolation, backup, retention, and disaster-recovery configuration require validation.
Use GitHub Actions for build, validation, security checks, migrations, and deployment workflows; provide unit, integration, and end-to-end coverage for core portal and ingestion flows.
Production promotion should require automated checks and environment-specific approvals.
Apply HTTPS/TLS, encryption in transit and at rest, secret management, tenant isolation, least privilege, secure token handling, vulnerability management, and audit-ready controls supporting SOC 2 and HIPAA-ready deployments.
HIPAA-ready operation may also require customer configuration, contractual terms, and operating procedures.
Provide centralized application and security logging, metrics, tracing, alerts, synchronization job visibility, error reporting, and operational dashboards for portal, APIs, retrieval, integrations, and storage.
Define service-level objectives, alert thresholds, retention, recovery objectives, and capacity limits during estimation.
Technical Assumptions
- The reference stack uses Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Supabase PostgreSQL/Auth, REST APIs, OpenAI Responses API, GitHub Actions, and Vercel.
- Supabase and Vercel US-region deployment options are available and can satisfy customer data-residency requirements.
- A customer identity provider or standard authentication capability is available if enterprise SSO is required.
- Google Drive OAuth credentials, API quotas, permission metadata, and customer administrative consent are available.
- Google Drive remains the authoritative source for document access permissions.
- Supabase Storage or an equivalent US-hosted object store is used for source files and ingestion artifacts.
- The RAG vector store supports tenant isolation, metadata filtering, permission-aware retrieval, and US hosting.
- Background workers or scheduled jobs are available for asynchronous Google Drive synchronization and document processing.
- Initial ingestion supports PDFs, spreadsheets, and wiki content; OCR, unsupported formats, and advanced parsing require separate estimates.
- Customer-specific retention, deletion, backup, disaster-recovery, service-level, throughput, concurrency, and synchronization-frequency targets are not yet defined.
- SOC 2-oriented and HIPAA-ready controls do not imply certification and may require organizational and contractual measures beyond product implementation.
- No document authoring, workflow approval, payments, mobile application, or deferred external integrations are included in the initial release.
Enterprise RAG App Cost FAQs
How much does it cost to build an enterprise RAG knowledge base?
About $16,430 for this MVP, based on 290 hours of AI-accelerated development. A web application for mid-market companies that creates a shared internal knowledge portal across disconnected business systems. It's a custom build - you own the code and the IP.
What's included in this knowledge base cost estimate?
Conversational AI assistant with cited, source-grounded answers and a searchable results list., Five API integrations spanning HR, SharePoint-style knowledge bases, project management, and Slack., Ingestion for PDFs, spreadsheets, and wiki content., Hybrid vector and BM25 retrieval with re-ranking and GraphRAG-style entity linking., OpenAI-based RAG answer generation.. The MVP prioritizes a practical shared knowledge portal rather than a broad enterprise governance suite.
Does this estimate include hosting or ongoing maintenance?
No. This is the one-time cost to build the MVP. Hosting scales with your user count - see our hosting and maintenance pricing for typical ranges, or use the app cost calculator to estimate hosting and retainer costs by year.
Can I get a quote for my specific knowledge base idea?
Yes. This estimate assumes the scope above; a different feature set, market, or integration list changes the price. Use ChatStack for a free, structured estimate tailored to your exact requirements.
Enterprise RAG is a registered trademark of its owner. App Developer Studio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Enterprise RAG. This estimate describes the cost of building a custom, independently-owned app with a comparable feature set, not a clone, license, or use of its brand or code.
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