OpenAI text-embedding-3-small Pricing
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small is an embedding model from OpenAI, priced at $0.0200 per 1M tokens. It produces 1536-dimensional vectors and accepts inputs up to 8,191 tokens.
Prices verified against official pricing pages. Sources: OpenAI
What does it cost to embed a corpus with OpenAI text-embedding-3-small?
Embedding cost is a one-time charge per document — unlike LLM inference, you only pay to embed each chunk once at ingest time. Re-embedding only happens when you re-chunk or swap models.
| Corpus size | Tokens | One-time embed cost |
|---|---|---|
| Small docs corpus (~1M tokens) | 1,000,000 | $0.0200 |
| Mid-size corpus (~50M tokens) | 50,000,000 | $1.0000 |
| Enterprise corpus (~500M tokens) | 500,000,000 | $10.0000 |
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Vector database sizing — what 1536-dim vectors cost to store
Each OpenAI text-embedding-3-small embedding is a 1536-dimensional float32 vector, ~ 6.00 KB per vector. At 1M vectors that's ~ 5859.4 MB of raw vector data (before index overhead). Compare against alternates with different dimension counts:
- OpenAI text-embedding-3-small: 1536 dims → 5859.4 MB per 1M vectors
- OpenAI text-embedding-3-large: 3072 dims → 11718.8 MB per 1M vectors
- Voyage 3 Large: 2048 dims → 7812.5 MB per 1M vectors
- Voyage 3 Lite: 512 dims → 1953.1 MB per 1M vectors
- Cohere Embed v4: 1024 dims → 3906.3 MB per 1M vectors
- Gemini Embedding: 768 dims → 2929.7 MB per 1M vectors
Alternatives to OpenAI text-embedding-3-small
Higher-priced embedding models
Other OpenAI embedding models: OpenAI text-embedding-3-large
FAQ
How much does OpenAI text-embedding-3-small cost?
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small costs $0.0200 per 1M tokens.
What are OpenAI text-embedding-3-small's embedding dimensions?
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small outputs 1536-dimensional vectors. This affects both storage size and similarity computation speed in your vector database.
What is the max input length?
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small accepts inputs up to 8,191 tokens. Larger documents must be chunked before embedding.
What's the cheapest alternative?
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small is already among the cheapest embedding models. The next-cheapest free or low-cost option is the Voyage 3 Lite.