Embedding costs for RAG in 2026: $0.02/M vs free self-hosted
Embedding 1M docs costs $10 with text-embedding-3-small or $67 with the large model. BGE-M3 self-hosted breaks even at 27B tokens per month. The math.
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Embedding 1M docs costs $10 with text-embedding-3-small or $67 with the large model. BGE-M3 self-hosted breaks even at 27B tokens per month. The math.
GPT-5 costs $2.13/1k for chat, $4.50 for extraction, $11.25 for summarization. Here's the exact per-token math and where batch saves you 50%.