How retrieval-augmented generation over your own data works and what drives its cost.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — answering from your own data — is one of the most useful AI patterns. Here is how it works and what drives its cost.
How RAG works
RAG retrieves relevant passages from your own documents and gives them to a model so answers are grounded in your content and can cite sources — reducing hallucination compared with a model answering from memory.
What drives cost
The cost drivers are data volume and preparation, the embedding and model usage, hosting (managed vs self-hosted), and ongoing updates as your content changes. A focused knowledge base costs far less than indexing everything.
Building it sensibly
Start with one well-defined knowledge set and a clear question to answer. osFoundry is a model-agnostic, bring-your-own-key (BYOK) AI orchestration platform — usage-based pricing with no per-seat fees, local-first and self-hostable, with per-region data pinning (US, EU or Japan) or deployment into your own cloud. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to the US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer an Australian managed region. For data that must stay in Australia, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside an Australian cloud region such as AWS (Sydney or Melbourne), Microsoft Azure (Australia East, Australia Southeast or Australia Central in Canberra) or Google Cloud (Sydney or Melbourne), or running models locally on-device.
Where dgm fits
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Australian businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.