Embedding APIs are priced per token. For a single-user store of a few thousand short memories, a full re-embed costs cents to single-digit dollars. Rough estimates (OpenAI list prices, may have changed):
| Memories × avg tokens | text-embedding-3-small | text-embedding-3-large |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 × 40 tokens | ~$0.001 | ~$0.005 |
| 10,000 × 40 tokens | ~$0.01 | ~$0.05 |
| 100,000 × 40 tokens | ~$0.10 | ~$0.50 |
Self-hosted models (Ollama, sentence-transformers) cost zero per token but you pay in compute time on the host.