Comparison
Should your team own this?
A real question with two real answers. Every team that wants grounded answers over its own content ends up building the same seven things — here is an honest inventory of them, and of what you give up by not owning them.
The inventory
What you would own.
Not the naive version of each — the version that survives a second source system and a bad week.
A chunker
Boundaries that do not cut a claim in half, and a strategy you can change later without re-embedding everything.
An embedder
A model choice you are stuck with, because changing it means recomputing every vector you have ever stored.
A vector store
Sizing, sharding, and a rebuild path for the day it loses a collection.
An entity and relationship extractor
Prompt design per content type, shard-level retries, and a cost ceiling so one tenant cannot spend your whole model budget.
A graph store
Entity resolution that holds under concurrent writers, so two workers processing two documents do not create two nodes for one thing.
An ontology manager
Versioning, and an apply path that does not destroy rows the new schema rejects — otherwise every vocabulary change is irreversible.
An answer synthesiser
Grounding enforced in the prompt, citation markers validated against the documents actually returned, and a refusal path when the corpus does not answer.
Plus the part that is not a system and takes the longest: orchestration that retries at the step rather than the job, bounds concurrency per tenant, and can replay a run that died halfway.
Why orchestration is the hard part
These are the numbers before and after we got it right.
Not a competitive benchmark — a record of what a naive pipeline does, and what fixing it is worth. This is the work you would be doing.
- Documents lost
- 9 in 205improved tozero
- Extraction p90
- ~103 simproved to5.2 s
- Throughput
- 3.0 / minimproved to17.1 / min
- Worst pipeline step
- 348% of budgetimproved to4%
Across the same corpus, after moving orchestration onto durable steps with per-step retries.
Per document, sharded and run concurrently under a per-organisation ceiling.
Documents fully processed per minute, same corpus, same hardware shape.
As a share of the load balancer timeout. Above 100% the request dies before it finishes.
The first version of this pipeline lost nine documents in two hundred and five, and its worst step took three and a half times the load balancer's patience. Neither failure was visible from the outside — documents simply were not there.
The honest trade
What you give up by not building it.
Buying is not free either. These are the four things you would be handing over.
What building gives you
What we do instead
Model choice. Your own extraction and embedding models, your own provider, your own region.
We select the models and pay for them. You cannot swap them, and that is a real constraint rather than a setting.
Deployment control. Your VPC, your keys, your compliance posture.
One managed deployment, one region. No bring-your-own-cloud and no customer-managed keys today.
A prompt you can tune per use case.
A synthesis prompt we tune, with grounding and refusal enforced. You can inspect every input to it, but not rewrite it.
No dependency on anyone else's roadmap.
A REST integration with no code-level coupling — but our roadmap is still ours.
Deciding
Which side you are on.
| If this is true of you | Build | Use GRaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Retrieval quality is your product's core differentiator | Included | Not included |
| Retrieval is a feature inside a product about something else | Not included | Included |
| You must run in your own cloud or a specific region | Included | Not included |
| You need a specific model or provider | Included | Not included |
| You have an engineer who can own a pipeline indefinitely | Included | Not included |
| You want the first cited answer this week | Not included | Included |
| You want a governable vocabulary without building versioning | Not included | Included |
| Your content spans two or more source systems | Not included | Included |
Build
- Retrieval quality is your product's core differentiator
- Included
- Retrieval is a feature inside a product about something else
- Not included
- You must run in your own cloud or a specific region
- Included
- You need a specific model or provider
- Included
- You have an engineer who can own a pipeline indefinitely
- Included
- You want the first cited answer this week
- Not included
- You want a governable vocabulary without building versioning
- Not included
- Your content spans two or more source systems
- Not included
Use GRaaS
- Retrieval quality is your product's core differentiator
- Not included
- Retrieval is a feature inside a product about something else
- Included
- You must run in your own cloud or a specific region
- Not included
- You need a specific model or provider
- Not included
- You have an engineer who can own a pipeline indefinitely
- Not included
- You want the first cited answer this week
- Included
- You want a governable vocabulary without building versioning
- Included
- Your content spans two or more source systems
- Included
FAQ
Frequently asked
Try the shortcut before you commit to the long way.
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