Is OpenAI Embeddings API free? What it actually costs in 2026
No free tier. It is a paid product.
Usage-based: $0.02/1M tokens (small) or $0.13/1M (large), half price via the batch API. The real bill is the corpus: every document, every update, and every re-index round-trips through the meter.
When paying is still the right call
Under roughly 10–15 million embeddings a month, the API is genuinely cheaper and simpler than self-hosting — $0.02/1M is a fair price and text-embedding-3-small is good. If your whole stack is OpenAI and your data isn't sensitive, staying is the pragmatic call.
What you are locked into
The sneaky kind: embeddings are model-specific, so switching means re-embedding the entire corpus into a new vector space. The API isn't holding your data hostage — the vectors are. Versioning your embedding model from day one is the escape hatch.
If you would rather not pay: Nomic Embed
Nomic Embed
The sovereign default — Apache-2.0, runs in Ollama, 8k context.
Free — runs locally via Ollama or sentence-transformers; your hardware is the cost
See all 5 OpenAI Embeddings API alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with OpenAI before you commit. More embedding models decisions on Macrostack.