verifier.org

EmbeddingGemma

the cheapest way to embed anything, if the gemma terms suit you

$0.002 / 1m tokens on DeepInfra#on-device#high-volume-embedding-wh#cost-dominate-everything

300m parameters that run on a laptop at a fiftieth of Gemini's price — held back by a licence that is commercially usable but not open source.

EmbeddingGemma is 300 million parameters, emits 768 dimensions truncatable to 512, 256 or 128, and claims over a hundred languages. it is built to run on phones and laptops, and it does. hosted on DeepInfra it costs $0.002 per million tokens — five times cheaper than the next cheapest option here and a hundredth of gemini-embedding-2 from the same company.

it publishes its MTEB numbers with the board version attached, which too few models here bother to do: 61.15 on multilingual v2 and 69.67 on english v2. those sit below Qwen3-Embedding-8B, as you would expect from a model a twenty-sixth of the size, and they are respectable for what it is.

the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.

pricing
$0.002 / 1m tokens on DeepInfra
our verdict

300m parameters that run on a laptop at a fiftieth of Gemini's price — held back by a licence that is commercially usable but not open source.

we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.

more embedding models

text-embedding-3-small

openai's cheaper embedding model, shortenable to fewer dimensions

#api#matryoshka

multilingual-e5

microsoft's open multilingual embedding family, widely used as a baseline

#open-weights#multilingual

ColBERT

late-interaction retrieval that scores token by token rather than one vector

#late-interaction#research

Qwen3-Embedding-8B

we checked this$0.010 / 1m tokens on DeepInfra

apache-2.0, best open multilingual quality, and a tenth of a cent hosted

#multilingual-retrieval-w#the-bill-has-to-be-small