RAG Cost Calculator

Calculate the full cost of a RAG pipeline: document embedding, vector storage, and LLM generation.

Documents

Retrieval

Embedding

Provider: OpenAI
Dimensions: 1,536
Max input: 8,191 tokens
Price: $0.02/1M tokens

Cost Breakdown

2,000Total Chunks
$0.020Indexing (one-time)
$0.016Per Query
$46.89Monthly Total

One-Time Indexing

Total chunks to embed2,000
Tokens per chunk512
Total tokens to embed1,024,000
Indexing cost$0.020

Monthly Query Costs

Monthly queries3,000
Query embedding cost$0.0030/mo
LLM generation cost2,710 input + 500 output tokens/query$46.89/mo
Total monthly cost$46.89/mo

Save your results — get the cheatsheet

Drop your email and I'll send over my RAG Architecture Playbook (free PDF). You'll also join the newsletter — unsubscribe anytime.

Or preview the RAG Architecture Playbook landing page →

Estimates assume ~50 tokens per query and ~100 system prompt tokens. Actual costs depend on your tokenizer, chunk strategy, and provider pricing. Vector database storage costs (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate) are not included. All calculations run locally in your browser.