Data & Retrieval
RAG & memory services
Hosted retrieval and long-term memory for chatbots and agents.
Cheapest right now
As of October 2026, the cheapest API for rag & memory services is OpenAI File Search from OpenAI at $2.50 per 1K queries, then Mem0 Starter from Mem0 at $3.80. Prices verified Oct 18, 2026 against each provider's pricing page; confirm there before you buy.
What it is
RAG services take your documents, split and index them, and answer questions with the most relevant passages (often with a generated answer and citations). Memory services store facts about each user or conversation so an agent remembers them later. Both save you building and running your own retrieval pipeline.
How pricing works
Billed per query or retrieval, often with separate charges for document ingestion and storage, and sometimes inside a monthly plan. We list the price for 1,000 retrieval queries on the cheapest paid plan, and say in each description what ingestion and storage cost.
We compare everything in one unit: USD per 1K queries.
Typical uses
- Chatbots that answer from your documents with citations
- Agents that remember users across sessions
- Internal search over wikis and drives
- Customer support assistants grounded in help articles
- Prototyping RAG without managing a vector database
What to compare
- Price per query and per document ingested
- Retrieval quality and citation support
- Connectors (Drive, Notion, Slack, websites)
- Whether it generates the answer or only returns passages
- Data limits and self-hosting options
Watch out for
- Ingestion and storage fees can exceed query fees for large document sets.
- Generated answers may still be wrong; check citations.
- Memory services store personal data about users; plan deletion and consent.
All 4 APIs, cheapest first
Free to browse| API | $ / 1K queries | Type | Generates answers | Data connectors | Quality | Price data | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supermemory Supermemory | $0.005 | both | No | Yes | – | Unverified sample | |
| OpenAI File Search OpenAI | $2.50 | rag | Yes | No | – | Verified Oct 18, 2026 | |
| Mem0 Starter Mem0 | $3.80 | memory | No | No | – | Verified Oct 18, 2026 | |
| Pinecone Assistant Pinecone | $40.50 | rag | Yes | No | – | Unverified sample |
Questions
- What is the cheapest API for rag & memory services?
- OpenAI File Search from OpenAI at $2.50 per 1K queries, verified Oct 18, 2026. Proxlai ranks 2 verified offerings in this market in the same unit.
- How is API pricing for rag & memory services compared?
- Billed per query or retrieval, often with separate charges for document ingestion and storage, and sometimes inside a monthly plan. We list the price for 1,000 retrieval queries on the cheapest paid plan, and say in each description what ingestion and storage cost. Proxlai converts every offering to one unit, USD per 1K queries, so prices can be ranked side by side.
- How current are these prices?
- Each price shows the date it was last checked against the provider's own pricing page and links to it. In this market, prices were verified Oct 18, 2026. Sample prices that have not been checked yet are left out of this summary.