Practical notes from the engineers who build agents, copilots and AI products.
Ask a RAG development services vendor how they measure retrieval quality, how they enforce who may see what, what the system costs to run at your query volume, what happens when a model is deprecated, and what you receive on the day the contract ends.
No retrieval system is DPDP-compliant as a category; an implementation is compliant or it is not. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 a RAG pipeline is processing on behalf of a data fiduciary, so retention, erasure and breach duties apply to the index, not just the source.
Measure four layers: retrieval, generation, product and business. Retrieval tells you whether the right passage was found, generation whether the answer stayed inside it, product whether anyone uses the system, and business whether a number your CFO tracks moved. A programme failing at one layer is failing.
Buy when your content is tidy, your permission model is simple and the questions are generic. Build when retrieval quality, access control or data residency decide whether anyone trusts the answer. Most mid-market companies end up with both: a bought tool for one team, a built pipeline for the system of record.
The ROI of a text to SQL solution comes from analyst hours returned and decisions taken sooner. A build starting at $12,500 or ₹8 lakh pays back in nine to fifteen months when thirty or more people ask recurring data questions and two analysts spend a third of their week answering them.
A production text to SQL solution costs $12,500 to $38,500, or ₹8,00,000 to ₹25,60,000, to build with Eazyware, plus token spend through your own model accounts and a care plan from $1,000 a month. Price is driven by schema complexity, the semantic layer and row-level security, not by the model you pick.
Implement a text to SQL solution in five stages: inventory the questions people actually ask, build a semantic layer that fixes definitions, retrieve the relevant schema instead of prompting the whole warehouse, generate and validate read-only SQL, then gate every release on an eval set of known-correct queries.
A text to SQL solution RFP needs six things: a ranked inventory of real questions, an honest description of your warehouse, acceptance criteria with numeric thresholds, the permission and DPDP requirements, a commercial model that states IP ownership, and support terms. Feature lists make bids incomparable.
A scoped text to SQL solution takes eight to twelve weeks from kick-off to a governed first release. Three of those weeks are question inventory and semantic modelling, four are build and evaluation, and two to three are shadow running with your analysts before anyone trusts an answer.