text-embedding-3-small is OpenAI's improved, more performant version of the ada embedding model. Embeddings are a numerical representation of text that can be used to measure the relatedness between two pieces of text. Embeddings are useful for search, clustering, recommendations, anomaly detection, and classification tasks.
Modalities
Price
$0.01/M tokens
Context
8K
Released
Oct 30, 2025
Different companies host the same model. OpenRouter routes your request to one of them based on the routing mode you pick — Balanced (price + speed), Nitro (fastest), or Exacto (highest tool-calling accuracy).
The chart below shows the average price customers are actually paying after prompt caching. Depending on the amount of repeated context you send, this can be 60–80% cheaper than the provider list price. Shown are rolling averages from the past 30 days.
Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).
Percent of requests that succeeded over the last 30 days. OpenRouter monitors every provider continuously and automatically retries on the next-best provider when one returns an error.
Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.
Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.
Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.