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Embedding Cost Calculator

Estimate the cost and vector storage of embedding a document corpus for RAG.

Your corpus

Every month

Quick Tool Overview

The Embedding Cost Calculator estimates chunks, vectors, embedding tokens, one-off and monthly cost, and vector database storage for a retrieval corpus, across OpenAI, Cohere, Voyage, Google and open embedding models at float32, half, int8 or binary precision.

What it does
Estimates embedding cost and vector storage for RAG
You give it
Documents, length, chunking and monthly activity
You get back
Vector count, costs and storage to plan for
Best for
Planning semantic search and RAG systems
AI Tools Free, unlimited use No sign-up Runs in your browser

About the Embedding Cost Calculator

Building retrieval over your documents means splitting them into chunks, turning every chunk into an embedding vector, storing those vectors, and embedding every search query as it arrives. This calculator estimates each part before you commit to a model or a database.

Enter the number of documents and their average length, then the chunk size and overlap. You get the chunks per document, the total vectors, and the tokens embedded — including the overlap, which is embedded twice. Choose an embedding model from OpenAI, Cohere, Voyage, Google or an open model to load its price and dimensions, and add how much of the corpus changes each month and how many queries you serve.

The storage estimate is often the more important number. Raw vectors, an HNSW index and the chunk text are sized separately, and switching the stored precision from float32 to halfvec, int8 or binary shows how much memory your vector database server really needs.

Key features of the Embedding Cost Calculator

Chunking maths included

Chunks per document and the extra tokens embedded twice by overlap.

One-off and monthly cost

Initial embedding plus re-embedding churn and query embeddings.

Storage breakdown

Raw vectors, HNSW index and chunk text sized separately.

Precision options

float32, halfvec, int8 and binary, to see how much memory quantized vectors save.

Popular embedding models

Prices and dimensions load automatically and stay editable.

How to use the Embedding Cost Calculator

  1. 1

    Choose an embedding model

    Its price per million tokens and vector dimensions fill in automatically.

  2. 2

    Describe the corpus

    Number of documents, average words per document, chunk size and overlap.

  3. 3

    Add monthly activity

    The share of the corpus re-embedded each month, and search queries served.

  4. 4

    Read cost and storage

    One-off and monthly cost, and the memory to size your vector database for.

Frequently asked questions

text-embedding-3-small is priced at a few cents per million tokens, so embedding tens of thousands of documents usually costs less than a few dollars. Storage and hosting typically cost more than the embeddings themselves.

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