The first AI feature I shipped on a flat plan lost money on the third user who discovered it. Not slowly. Immediately. He was running a script through it on a loop because the UI did not stop him from doing that, and his single account burned through more in API costs that week than the feature was supposed to make in a month. I shipped the fix on a Sunday and rewrote the pricing on a Tuesday, and
In Q3 2024, 72% of production RAG pipelines failed to meet p99 latency SLAs for multimodal queries, according to a Datadog survey of 1,200 engineering teams. Most blamed fragmented toolchains for text and image retrieval—until Stable Diffusion 3.0’s embedding API and Llama 4’s 1M-token context window changed the game. This is the definitive guide to building unified multimodal RAG pipelines that c