Is self hosted LLM worth it for company knowledge base?

r/LocalLLaMA
Generative AI

My company is exploring building a RAG system for internal company documentation and onboarding materials. One of the main questions that came up is data privacy. Ideally, we don't want to send internal documents to external APIs. Because of that, we're considering self-hosting an LLM instead of using something like OpenAI or Anthropic. Our company is pretty small, we are roughly 12 people.