text-embedding-3-small API Pricing
OpenAI's small embedding model for cheap semantic search, clustering, and RAG indexing. OpenAI lists it at $0.02/M tokens; embeddings have no separate output-token price in the model page. Pulled directly from developers.openai.com.
Run the numbers.
Live calculator pre-loaded with current text-embedding-3-small embedding rates. Use token counts from your indexing pipeline to estimate one-time and recurring embedding costs.
Real-world presets.
Help-center index
Semantic search catalog
Research notes clustering
Content dedupe pipeline
Price history.
Paste text. See tokens. See cost.
This is a chars-per-token approximation, not a real tokenizer. Actual tokens vary by language, code density, and tool-call overhead — counts are typically ±10–20% off for English prose, more for code or non-Latin scripts. For exact billing, use the vendor's official tokenizer.
| Model | Input /M | Output /M | Effective blended | Context | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| text-embedding-3-small Current | $0.02 | $0.00 | $0.02 embedding cost | input-only | Low-cost high-volume retrieval |
| text-embedding-3-large | $0.13 | $0.00 | $0.12 embedding peer | input-only | text-embedding-3-large |
| GPT-5.4 nano | $0.20 cache $0.02 | $1.25 | $0.15 text model baseline | 400K | Cheap text model, not embeddings |
| GPT-5.4 mini | $0.75 cache $0.07 | $4.50 | $0.54 text model baseline | 400K | Subagents and lightweight generation |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | $0.10 cache $0.01 | $0.40 | $0.06 Google budget text | 1M | Budget multimodal model |
Frequently asked.
Practical text-embedding-3-small pricing questions for RAG and semantic-search workloads.
Q · 01 What is the text-embedding-3-small API price? +
text-embedding-3-small at $0.02/M tokens. Embedding models bill the text you embed; there is no separate generated-output token charge in the model page.Q · 02 Is there cached-input pricing? +
Q · 03 How does this compare with the other OpenAI embedding model? +
text-embedding-3-large in the shelf. OpenAI's model docs list text-embedding-3-large at $0.13/M and text-embedding-3-small at $0.02/M.Q · 04 Is Batch API available? +
Q · 05 What release date is used here? +
January 25, 2024 and introduced both text-embedding-3-small and text-embedding-3-large. This page uses 2024-01-25 as the launch point.Q · 06 How accurate is the tokenizer estimate? +
4.875 characters per token for English text. Exact embedding bills depend on the tokenizer, language, punctuation, whitespace, code, and chunking strategy.