What does an AI document-Q&A app cost per month?
Before committing to a model, most teams letting users ask questions of their files want to estimate a document-Q&A app's monthly cost. This page does exactly that with an interactive calculator, so instead of guessing you get a concrete monthly cost grounded in today's provider prices.
Start here: RAG Cost Calculator
Results update automatically as you type.
- Total chunks
- 2,000
- Ingestion (one-time)
- $0.0205
- Vector storage
- 0.01 GB
- Storage / month
- $0.00343
- Per query
- $0.0113
- Queries / month(1,000/day)
- $337.52
- Total / month
- $337.53
Then: Embedding Cost Calculator
Results update automatically as you type.
- Tokens
- 1,000,000
- Rate
- $0.02/M
- Passes
- 1
- Total cost
- $0.0200
Why this isn't trivial
The part people underestimate: embedding the document set and answering questions with retrieved context are separate costs that scale differently. In practice the biggest savings come from embedding once and reusing it, and keeping retrieved context tight, so it is worth modelling before you commit.
How it's calculated
We estimate this by combining the one-time embedding of your documents with the monthly per-query generation cost. Every figure uses the current provider prices baked into the site (reviewed daily), and you can override any input to match your own assumptions.
Frequently asked questions
Do I re-embed documents often?+
Only when they change; static corpora are embedded once and reused.
What if users upload their own docs?+
Then embedding becomes an ongoing cost tied to upload volume, which the calculator can model.
Are these prices up to date?+
Yes. The model prices behind this calculator are refreshed and reviewed daily, so your estimate reflects current provider rates rather than a stale snapshot.
Related
Estimates for planning. Pricing data last reviewed 28 July 2026.