How Much Does It Cost to Embed Your Documents?
Embedding turns your documents into vectors for search, and it is usually a one-time cost — until your content changes or you switch models. This guide shows how to estimate it and what makes it recur.
One-time, but not always
You embed each document once, so the initial cost is your corpus size in tokens times the embedding rate. It becomes recurring whenever documents change, you add content, or you migrate to a different embedding model and must re-embed everything.
Dimensions drive storage, not embedding price
Embedding price depends on tokens processed, but the vector dimension you choose drives ongoing storage cost. Higher dimensions can improve retrieval slightly while noticeably increasing what you pay to store the index.
Calculators for this topic
Frequently asked questions
Is embedding a one-time cost?+
Mostly — you embed the corpus once and only re-embed when documents change or you switch embedding models.
What makes embedding cost recur?+
Adding or updating documents, refreshing a knowledge base, or migrating to a new model that requires re-embedding.