Tier 1 · instant download
RAG architecture decision guide
The retrieval decisions that matter, and the trade-off behind each, from a system running at scale.
What you get
- Chunking strategy, and where each one breaks
- Embedding choice
- Index type
- Hybrid retrieval and reranking
Three ways to tell whether this applies to you.
If none of these describes your situation, this is the wrong product, and the catalog has nine others.
- You are choosing a retrieval architecture and the decision is hard to reverse
- You want to know where each option breaks before you find out in production
- You are past the prototype and the corpus is growing
The file, before you buy it
Read from the artifact itself rather than described, so what is printed here and what arrives cannot drift apart.
- The order to decide in
- Chunking, and where each strategy breaks
- Embedding choice
- Index type
- Hybrid retrieval and reranking
- What MetaMinds runs, with the numbers
- The evaluation harness, which is what makes any of this real
- Decision summary
- Sources
The order to decide in
Four decisions taken out of order is how a retrieval system gets rebuilt twice.
The guide's first section is the order to decide in. Choosing an index before the chunking is settled, or adding a reranker to compensate for an embedding nobody revisited, is how a retrieval system gets rebuilt.
- 01Chunking, and where each strategy breaksChunking decides what a single retrievable unit is.
- 02Embedding choiceThe dimensions that actually matter, in the order they usually decide it.
- 03Index typeThree parameters.
- 04Hybrid retrieval and rerankingDense vectors and keyword search fail differently, which is exactly why combining them works.
The guide also publishes what MetaMinds runs, with the numbers, and the evaluation harness that makes a change to any of the four measurable rather than a matter of opinion.
SourceSection headings read from deliverables/T1-ENG-01/rag-architecture-decision-guide.html at build time.
Delivery and license
Stated here rather than in the terms, because these are the questions asked before a purchase and not after it.
- Delivery
- Immediate download.
- License
- Single organization, internal use, perpetual. Adapt it for your own systems freely. Do not resell it or publish it as your own.
HTML · Four decisions in dependency order, with where each option breaks · Version 1.0 · 21 September 2026
What usually goes with this
Each of these does something this one does not, and the line under it says what. They are separate items, not an upsell path.
LLM cost model spreadsheet
The architecture choices in this guide are the ones the cost model prices.
$149
Hallucination evaluation starter kit
These decisions are what move groundedness. The evaluation kit is how you find out whether they did.
$490
Before you ask
These are the same strings this page puts in its structured data, so a person and an answer engine read identical text.
Can I buy this today?
Yes. It is $290, one payment, in USD, and the file downloads as soon as the payment clears.
What if I want the work done rather than the file?
The fixed-scope engagements on the services page cover the same ground with a person doing the work, at a published price and a fixed duration. Those are available now: a vendor AI assessment at $2,500 over three days is the smallest, an EU AI Act readiness assessment is $4,900 over one week, and an ISO/IEC 42001 gap assessment is $8,900 over two to three weeks.
What exactly is RAG architecture decision guide?
The retrieval decisions that matter, and the trade-off behind each, from a system running at scale. It is a Tier 1 instant product from MetaMinds, listed at $290 in USD as a single payment. Tier 1 is the entry rung of a three-tier catalog: instant products from $99 to $890, fixed-scope engagements from $2,500 to $8,900, and scoped builds from $18,000.
What happens after I pay?
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It downloads the moment you pay.
No call, no scoping, no waiting. If you would rather a person did this work, the engagements on the services page cover the same ground at a fixed price and a fixed duration.