[poll] How much of a RAG monthly bill is generation tokens?

[akash-coded]

Calibration poll. Guess before you read The Cost Iceberg.

A mid-size deployment: 2M chunks, 300k queries a month, self-hosted encoder, corpus churns 15% a
month, an in-VPC OpenSearch cluster.

What share of the monthly bill is generation tokens?

• A — about 80%. It is the expensive model call
• B — about 55%
• C — about 30%
• D — under 15%. The cluster dominates

Why this is worth guessing first

Almost everyone quotes a per-query token cost when a client asks what the system costs. If your
guess is A or B, you would describe a minority of the bill with high confidence and imply the
rest is rounding — and that conversation goes badly in month three because your number was
accurate.

How to vote. The API cannot create a native poll widget, so vote with a reaction on this post — 👍 A · 🎉 B · 😄 C · 🚀 D — and reply if your answer needs a condition attached. The reveal is posted as a reply in about a week, never by editing this body: editing would destroy the record of what you were actually asked.