Embedding Model API Pricing 2026: OpenAI vs Cohere vs Voyage vs Open Source
Embedding model cost is the silent budget killer in production AI systems - a pipeline processing 500K documents can cost hundreds per month. This compares OpenAI, Cohere, and Voyage commercial APIs plus bge/e5 open-source self-hosted options: price, dimensions, and cost per 1M docs.
💡 What You Will Learn
Embedding model cost is the silent budget killer in production AI systems - a pipeline processing 500K documents can cost hundreds per month. This compares OpenAI, Cohere, and Voyage commercial APIs p
📜 Table of Contents
Embedding model cost is the silent budget killer in production AI systems. A pipeline processing 500K documents can cost hundreds per month.
Commercial Embedding APIs
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small
- Price: $0.02 per 1M tokens
- Dimensions: 512
- Cost for 1M docs: $10
OpenAI text-embedding-3-large
- Price: $0.13 per 1M tokens
- Dimensions: 3,072
- Cost for 1M docs: $65
Cohere Embed v3
- Paid: $0.10 per 1K embeddings
- Dimensions: 1,024
- Best for: Multilingual (100+ languages)
Voyage AI
- Price: ~$0.03 per 1M tokens
- Dimensions: 1,024
- Best for: Code-heavy documents
Open Source (Self-Host)
| Model | Size | Dimensions | GPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| bge-small-en-v1.5 | 33MB | 384 | CPU OK |
| bge-base-en-v1.5 | 110MB | 768 | CPU OK |
| bge-large-en-v1.5 | 335MB | 1,024 | GPU nice |
| e5-mistral-7b | 14GB | 4,096 | GPU required |
| ## Cost Comparison (1M Documents) | |||
| Provider | Cost | Speed | Quality |
| ---------- | ------ | ------- | --------- |
| OpenAI 3-small | $10 | Fast | High |
| OpenAI 3-large | $65 | Fast | Highest |
| Cohere | ~$100 | Fast | High |
| Voyage | ~$3 | Fast | High |
| bge-small (self-host) | $0 + GPU | Medium | Medium |
| bge-large (self-host) | $0 + GPU | Medium | High |
| ## When to Use What | |||
| - Under 10K docs: OpenAI 3-small | |||
| - 10K-100K docs: Voyage (best price-to-quality ratio) | |||
| - 100K-1M docs: Self-host bge-base on single GPU | |||
| - Over 1M docs: Self-host bge-large | |||
| ## The Hidden Cost: Latency | |||
| OpenAI API: 150-300ms per batch. Self-hosted bge-small on T4: ~5ms per batch. For 1M docs: 41 hours vs 1.4 hours. | |||
| ## Bottom Line | |||
| Best setup: bge-base self-hosted for production (>100K docs), OpenAI 3-small for prototyping. | |||
| All pricing from official sources as of July 2026. |
Written by our editorial team; tools listed here are tested or verified against public sources. Links point to official sites or GitHub repos for reference only โ no paid placements.
