Embedding Cost Calculator
Calculate monthly and annual costs of generating text embeddings with OpenAI or Cohere models.
Did this tool work for you?
How to use this calculator
- 1
Enter the number of texts you need to embed each month (documents, product descriptions, messages, etc.).
- 2
Enter the average number of tokens per text. A typical paragraph is 100–300 tokens.
- 3
Select your embedding model and compare costs instantly.
Frequently asked questions
What is an embedding?
An embedding converts text into a high-dimensional numeric vector that captures semantic meaning. Similar texts have vectors that are close together in space. Embeddings power semantic search, recommendation engines, and RAG pipelines.
Which embedding model should I use?
text-embedding-3-small is the most cost-efficient and performs well for most tasks. text-embedding-3-large offers higher accuracy for complex retrieval tasks at 6× the cost. ada-002 is the legacy model — 3-small outperforms it at lower cost.
Do I pay to embed documents multiple times?
Only if you re-embed them. The typical pattern is to embed each document once and store the vector. You only pay again if documents are updated or you change models.
Embedding Cost Calculator — OpenAI & Cohere Pricing
What drives embedding costs
Embedding costs scale with total token volume: the number of texts multiplied by their average length. Longer documents cost more to embed but often don't need to be split as finely. Chunking strategy — how you split documents before embedding — directly affects your monthly bill.
Caching embeddings to cut costs
If you embed the same texts repeatedly (e.g., a fixed product catalog queried by many users), cache the vectors in a vector database. You pay once to generate the embedding and retrieve it for free on every query. This can reduce embedding spend by 90%+ for read-heavy workloads.
Learn more from an authoritative source:
OpenAI Platform DocsFine-Tuning Cost Calculator
Estimate the training cost and ongoing inference cost of fine-tuning an OpenAI language model.
AI Image Generation Cost Calculator
Calculate monthly costs for AI image generation with DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney.
RAG Pipeline Cost Calculator
Estimate the monthly cost of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline including indexing, embeddings, and LLM inference.
GPU Cloud Cost Calculator
Compare GPU rental costs across AWS, GCP, Azure, Lambda Labs, and Vast.ai for ML training and inference workloads.
AI Chatbot ROI Calculator
Calculate the return on investment of deploying an AI chatbot for customer support, including payback period and annual ROI.
LLM Latency Calculator
Estimate expected LLM response latency — time-to-first-token and total response time — for planning real-time AI applications.
Results are estimates for informational purposes only and do not constitute professional financial, medical, legal, or technical advice. Read full disclaimer →