[tinyhouse]

Embeddings is one of those things that using OpenAI (or any other provider) isn't really necessary. There are many small open source embedding models that perform very well. Plus, you can finetune them on your task. You can also run locally and not worry about all the constraints (latency, rate limits etc) of using an external provider endpoint. If performance is important for you, then you'll need a GPU.

The main reason to use one of those providers is if you want something that performs well out of the box without doing any work and you don't mind paying for it. Those companies like OpenAI, Cohere and others, already did they work to make those models work well on various domains. They may also use larger models that are not as easy to deal with yourself. (although as I mentioned previously, a small embeddings model fine-tuned on your task is likely to perform as well as a much bigger general model)