---
title: "text-embedding-3-small Notes"
url: https://mdfy.app/ycd06RQQ
updated: 2026-05-10T21:00:23.747Z
source: "mdfy.app"
---
# text-embedding-3-small Notes

OpenAI's most cost-effective embedding model.

- **Dimensions**: 1536 (default), reducible via `dimensions` param
- **Pricing**: $0.02 / 1M tokens input
- **Context**: 8191 tokens
- **Use case**: semantic search, clustering, recommendation

## Trade-offs vs -3-large
- Smaller = cheaper + faster
- Quality drop is real but small for general English
- For multilingual: -large pulls ahead

## Why mdfy uses -small
50,000 docs × ~1k tokens/doc × $0.02/M = $1 to fully embed a hub.
That's the right operating point for free-tier users.

## Reduction trick
Truncate to 512 dims for storage savings — re-normalize before
similarity search. mdfy doesn't do this yet; pgvector(1536) is fine
under 100k docs/user.