Let's talk about your project
Tell us your catalogue size, the user interaction data you have, and where recommendations will appear in your product. We'll scope the right approach and give you a fixed cost.
Generic recommendation systems trained on open datasets don't understand your catalogue, your users, or your business context. A product recommendation engine for an electronics retailer needs different signals than one for a streaming platform or a B2B SaaS tool. We build custom recommendation systems trained on your interaction data -- collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, hybrid models, and LLM-powered recommendations -- designed around your specific catalogue, user behaviour, and business objectives.
Recent outcomes
Voice AI · Research
Text-based interviews converted to automated phone calls
6× deeper insightsAI Automation · Ops
Manual invoice OCR across 40+ gas stations
20k+ txns day oneLoyalty · Retail
SuperValu & Centra loyalty platform with receipt validation
1,062 users in 4 weeksSaaS · Logistics
Multi-carrier shipping hub for Indonesian eCommerce
2,000+ shipments yr 1RaftLabs builds custom recommendation systems for e-commerce, media, SaaS, and marketplace platforms. We develop collaborative filtering models, content-based engines, hybrid models, and LLM-powered recommendation systems -- all trained on your user interaction data and catalogue. We also build real-time recommendation APIs, batch pipelines for email personalisation, and A/B testing infrastructure to measure business impact on engagement and revenue. A focused single-surface recommendation system runs $25,000-$60,000. A full recommendation platform with multiple surfaces and advanced A/B testing runs $60,000-$150,000. Most projects deliver in 8-16 weeks.
Trusted by
A recommendation engine that doesn't understand your catalogue recommends items that are superficially similar but not actually relevant. A collaborative filtering model trained on too little data recommends popular items to everyone. A content-based model without proper item attributes recommends based on surface characteristics rather than the features users actually care about.
Custom recommendation systems are trained on your data, tuned for your business objectives, and measured against your actual engagement and revenue metrics.
Capabilities
User-based and item-based collaborative filtering trained on your interaction data -- purchase history, click streams, view events, ratings, and engagement signals. Matrix factorisation approaches (ALS, SVD) for large-scale user-item interaction datasets. Real-time user similarity computation for personalised recommendations. Cold-start handling for new users with content-based fallbacks.
Item similarity models built from catalogue attributes -- product categories, tags, descriptions, price ranges, and custom metadata. User preference profiles built from interaction history. Hybrid content-item representations that combine structured attributes with text embeddings from product descriptions. Effective for catalogues with rich metadata and for new-item cold-start scenarios.
Recommendation systems that use large language models to understand item descriptions, user queries, and preference signals in natural language. Semantic similarity between user intent and catalogue items. Recommendation explanations in natural language ("Recommended because you bought X"). Effective for conversational recommendation interfaces and for catalogues where text descriptions carry the primary signal.
Low-latency recommendation APIs that serve personalised recommendations in real time -- typically under 100ms for homepage, product detail page, and cart recommendations. Precomputed recommendation caches for high-traffic surfaces, real-time user event processing for recency weighting, and feature stores that make user context available to the recommendation model without repeated computation.
Batch recommendation pipelines for personalised email and push notification content -- product recommendations, content suggestions, and re-engagement recommendations based on user history and current context. Scheduled generation of personalised content for sending time optimisation. Integration with email platforms (Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Iterable) and push notification services (OneSignal, Firebase Cloud Messaging).
Batch jobs run on a configurable cadence (nightly for daily sends, hourly for triggered workflows) using precomputed recommendation vectors stored in Redis or a feature store such as Feast. Popularity-based fallback recommendations handle cold-start users who have no interaction history, pulling from trending items within the user's most-visited categories. Segment-level personalisation groups users by behavioural cohort when individual histories are too sparse for reliable collaborative filtering. Re-engagement sequences use recency-weighted item embeddings to surface products the user showed intent on but did not purchase, rather than generic bestsellers.
Experimentation infrastructure for recommendation systems: user assignment to control and treatment groups, metric tracking for business impact (CTR, conversion, revenue per user, engagement), statistical significance testing, and reporting dashboards. A/B testing that tells you whether your recommendations are actually driving the outcomes you care about, not just whether they look different.
Holdout groups are assigned at the user level and hashed consistently so users stay in the same bucket across sessions. Online metrics tracked per experiment include click-through rate at position k, add-to-cart rate, conversion rate, revenue per impression, and session depth. Offline evaluation during development uses precision@10 and NDCG (normalised discounted cumulative gain) measured on a time-based held-out split -- not a random split, which leaks future signal into training. Bandit algorithms (epsilon-greedy, Thompson sampling) are available for recommendation contexts where a hard A/B split wastes too much opportunity cost on clearly inferior variants. Experiment duration is calculated from expected traffic volume and minimum detectable effect before any test is launched, so you know upfront whether the test will reach statistical significance before your product cycle closes.
Collaborative filtering, content-based, hybrid, and LLM-powered recommendations. Fixed cost delivery.
Process
Before building, we assess your data -- interaction volume, catalogue size, metadata quality, and cold-start severity. The assessment determines which recommendation approach will work for your specific data state. We don't recommend collaborative filtering if you don't have sufficient interaction data, or content-based filtering if your item metadata is sparse. Honest assessment before any development commitment.
Every recommendation model is evaluated on historical data before deployment: precision and recall at K, NDCG, coverage, and novelty metrics measured on a held-out test set. Offline evaluation catches approaches that look good on average but fail on specific user segments or catalogue sections. We establish minimum performance thresholds before the model goes to production.
Production recommendation systems improve over time through experimentation. We build the A/B testing infrastructure so your team can run controlled experiments on recommendation changes and measure the actual business impact. Recommendation quality is tracked as a product metric, not a one-time engineering deliverable.
Recommendation APIs integrated into your product -- e-commerce platform, mobile app, content management system, or custom application. Event tracking for interaction data collection (views, clicks, purchases, ratings) that feeds back into model retraining. Data pipeline from your product database to the recommendation model. The full integration, not just a model.
Custom models trained on your data with A/B testing to prove business impact. Fixed cost.
Predictive Analytics -- ML models for forecasting and risk scoring
Custom AI Development -- end-to-end custom AI system development
Generative AI Development -- LLM-powered product development
RAG Pipeline Development -- retrieval-augmented generation systems
AI Product Engineering -- AI-first product development
Tell us your catalogue size, the user interaction data you have, and where recommendations will appear in your product. We'll scope the right approach and give you a fixed cost.
Frequently asked questions
We build across the main recommendation approaches: (1) Collaborative filtering -- recommendations based on the behaviour of similar users (user-based) or similar items (item-based). Works well when you have sufficient interaction data (views, purchases, ratings, clicks). (2) Content-based filtering -- recommendations based on item attributes and user preference profiles. Works when you have rich item metadata and can profile user preferences. (3) Hybrid models -- combining collaborative and content-based signals for better coverage and accuracy. Most production systems use hybrid approaches. (4) LLM-powered recommendations -- using language models to understand item descriptions, user queries, and preference signals in natural language. Effective for new-item cold-start problems and when catalogue items have rich text descriptions. (5) Session-based recommendations -- predicting the next item based on current session behaviour, without requiring user history. We select the approach based on your data availability, catalogue size, and use case requirements.
Data requirements depend on the approach. For collaborative filtering: user-item interaction data -- at minimum, implicit feedback (clicks, views, add-to-cart, purchases) across a sufficient user and item population. Typically need 100,000+ interactions for stable collaborative filtering; more is better. For content-based filtering: structured item attributes (category, brand, price range, tags) and either user preference history or signals you can use to build preference profiles. For LLM-powered recommendations: item text descriptions (title, description, features). Cold-start is a solvable problem -- we design systems that handle new users and new items with content-based fallbacks. We assess your data during scoping and design the right approach for what you have.
We build measurement infrastructure as part of every recommendation system: A/B testing framework to compare recommendation variants against each other or against a baseline, online metrics (click-through rate, add-to-cart rate, conversion, revenue per user, session depth), and offline evaluation metrics (precision, recall, NDCG) on historical data during development. Business impact metrics are agreed before development starts -- the recommendation system should improve specific measurable outcomes, not just produce plausible-looking results. We design the A/B testing infrastructure so you can run experiments and measure the actual revenue or engagement impact of recommendation changes.
A focused recommendation system -- one recommendation use case (product recommendations, content recommendations, or similar items), trained on your data, with a production API and basic A/B testing -- typically runs $25,000--$60,000. A full recommendation platform with multiple recommendation surfaces (homepage, PDP, cart, email), real-time personalisation, and advanced A/B testing infrastructure runs $60,000--$150,000. Cost depends on the algorithmic complexity, data pipeline requirements, real-time vs. batch serving, and the number of recommendation surfaces. We scope every project before pricing it.
Work with us
We scope Recommendation System Development in 30 minutes. You walk away with a clear cost, timeline, and approach. No commitment required.