Retrieval Portability Premium

Retrieval Portability Premium is the pricing advantage an agency earns when its RAG stack can be re-pointed at a different retrieval engine without rewriting client applications. The framework treats retrieval quality as a moving benchmark rather than a fixed capability: whichever context engine leads on accuracy this quarter may trail next quarter, and the agency that can swap providers in days keeps its margin while the agency welded to one vendor absorbs the re-platforming cost. A concrete case is the choice between a managed context engine such as Ragie, a web data API such as Context.dev, and a rules-plus-retrieval decision layer such as ai·rete·rag: each exposes different ingestion and retrieval semantics, so the abstraction layer is what makes substitution cheap. For agencies, portability converts a commodity API into a defensible delivery asset, because clients renew on answer quality, not on which vendor supplied the index.