Embeddings for RAG: best provider for agents (Depot Pick)

Scores as of 2026-10-19 (8 days old).

Depot Pick

Cohere · 7.89/10 for this job (curated estimate, high confidence)

Capability for retrieval quality + pricePerf. Cohere remains general default (enterprise + multilingual). Voyage when nDCG/lite $0.02 SKU wins the bake-off; Jina when you also want Reader/rerank in one EU API.

Runner-up

Voyage AI · 8.37/10

Scores higher than the pick on: Capability fit, Price / performance, Developer & agent DX, Lock-in risk (higher = worse).

When not to use the pick

Already standardized on OpenAI embeddings operationally; retrieval-quality bake-off winner is Voyage; need local/open embed models on HF/Fireworks; want URL-to-markdown + embeddings together — Jina.

Lock-in / migration

Runner-up Voyage AI has lower stored lock-in risk (4.2 vs 4.5, 0–10, higher = more lock-in). Self-host fallback listed for this job: BGE-M3, Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B, jina-embeddings-v3.

Sourced price (no comparable unit)

Pick: no sourced price in this job's unit (no_matching_sourced_price).

Cheapest matching SKU: Cloudflare Workers AI @cf/baai/bge-m3 $0.012 — source, as of 2026-10-03, re-checked 2026-10-27. Not the pick; not quality-adjusted.

Price history: first seen 2026-10-03 · last changed no change recorded · history JSON

Free option

• BGE-M3 (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• Cloudflare Workers AI embeddings (free) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• Cohere trial key, embed (free) — source, as of 2026-10-25

Failure modes to watch

• Stale retrieval: Store the source URL and the time it was fetched. If a newer canonical page exists, or two stored sources disagree, do not answer from the older one.
• Runaway spend: Set a budget and a tool-call cap per task. Alert when spend jumps. Stop the run at the cap instead of summarizing a partial trace as success.
• Context overflow: If the input exceeds the window, say so and retrieve a narrower slice. Do not answer from a truncated head as if it were the whole source.
• Eval contamination: Keep gold labels out of the agent prompt. Store the harness version beside the score. Do not compare a number across a benchmark revision without saying the revision changed.
• Lost in the middle: Ask the agent to name the passage it used. Spot-check questions whose only support sits in the middle of the context, not only at the edges.
• Policy conflict: If cited sources contradict each other, return the conflict and the URLs. Do not pick a winner silently.

Reported outcomes (submitted reports only)

This job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Depot Pick (Cohere) on this job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Cite: Agent Provider Depot, Depot Pick for embeddings: cohere, scores as of 2026-10-19. Agents: GET /api/decide?jtbd=embeddings