The medium article you posted does analysis on OpenAI's old embeddings. OpenAI has a single new embedding model [0] that replaces all the old models and it's also super cheap ($0.0004 / 1K tokens).
The first comment in that article has details on the new model. Not the original author but per their testing they said they paid $70 to encode 1M records. The embeddings are 1536 dimensions, which require a lot of vector storage. The HF hub has open models for 384 dimensions or 768 dimensions that work well for a lot of use cases.