Rerank retrieved chunks for RAG

Scores as of 2026-09-14 (43 days old; Depot marks scores stale after 30 days). The pick is still Depot's current editorial pick; it has not been re-reviewed since. Prices below carry their own dates.

Depot Pick

Voyage AI · 8.40/10 for this job (curated estimate, high confidence)

Capability of rerank quality + pricePerf (lite SKUs, free tokens). Distinct from embeddings (first-stage vectors).

Runner-up

Cohere · 7.95/10

Scores higher than the pick on: Privacy / data retention, Maturity / track record.

When not to use the pick

Already on Cohere embed+rerank in one bill — stay; want EU all-in-one embed/rerank/Reader — Jina; tiny corpus where embeddings alone suffice — skip rerank.

Lock-in / migration

The pick has lower stored lock-in risk than runner-up Cohere (4.2 vs 4.5). Self-host fallback listed for this job: BGE-reranker-v2-m3, Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B, FlashRank.

Sourced price (usd_per_million_tokens)

Pick's lowest sourced SKU: rerank-3-lite $0.02 (usd_per_million_tokens) — source, as of 2026-10-03, re-checked 2026-10-27

Cheapest matching SKU: Voyage AI rerank-3-lite $0.02 — source, as of 2026-10-03, re-checked 2026-10-27. The pick is the cheapest.

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

Free option

• BGE-reranker-v2-m3 (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• Cloudflare Workers AI bge-reranker-base (free) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• Cohere trial key, rerank (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 (Voyage AI) on this job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Cite: Agent Provider Depot, Depot Pick for rag-rerank: voyage, scores as of 2026-09-14. Agents: GET /api/decide?jtbd=rag-rerank