The 80% problem
Frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex are great for prototypes. You can follow a tutorial, connect your documents, and have a working demo in a few days. Run it on a few documents and the results look promising. Then you deploy to production. Results appear to be subpar, users quickly notice. Getting from 80% to 95% takes months of work:- Building and testing document parsing pipelines
- Experimenting with chunking strategies and chunk sizes
- Tuning hybrid search (semantic + keyword)
- Configuring and testing rerankers
What RAG-as-a-service provides
Instead of building and maintaining this infrastructure yourself, RAG-as-a-service gives you:- Parsing and chunking — Optimized pipelines that produce clean, logical chunks across 22+ file formats without custom code per format.
- Query generation — Automatic multi-query expansion from conversation context, covering more ground than a single hybrid search.
- Reranking — Built-in reranking that significantly improves chunk relevance, often compensating for suboptimal upstream choices.
- Scale — Ingest and search millions of documents without managing vector storage, object storage, indexing, or compute.
- Continuous improvement — Automatic access to new retrieval methods as they emerge, without changing your code.