Applications
Embedding cost calculator
One-time and monthly cost of embedding a document set, by model.
Prices read from the vendor pages on 2026-10-20. Arithmetic on list prices, not advice or a quote.
Saving and exports need Norwell Tools Pro, $9 a month. See what is in it. Everything above is free.
How it works
Embeddings are billed on input tokens only. The initial load dominates; the monthly figure is the re-embedding of changed documents. Storage and vector search are priced by the database, not here.
The formula
tokens = documents * avg_tokens; initial = tokens * price / 1,000,000; monthly = initial * reembed_shareWorked example
With the inputs the page opens on:
- documents: 50000
- avg tokens per document: 800 tokens
- model: text-embedding-3-small
- reembed share pct per month: 10%
gives
- total tokens: 40,000,000 tokens
- initial cost: $0.800
- monthly cost: $0.0800
- cost per 1k documents: $0.0160
Sources
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing (read 2026-10-20)
- https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing (read 2026-10-20)
- https://docs.mistral.ai/inference/pricing (read 2026-10-20)
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-10-20; the page may have changed since. This is arithmetic on published list prices, not advice or a quote. Check the vendor's page before committing a budget.
Questions
Does a bigger model cost more to store?
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