I'm building a startup prototype with embeddings, what is simplest to run?

If you want the simplest thing to run for a startup prototype, the answer is usually:

Best default: a hosted embedding API

Use a managed embedding model from:

• OpenAI
• Cohere
• Voyage
• Anthropic? (less common for embeddings)
• AWS / Azure / GCP model endpoints if you’re already on one cloud

Why this is simplest

• No GPU setup
• No model deployment
• No scaling headaches
• Fast to integrate
• Good quality out of the box

What it looks like

Typical flow:

1. Send text to embedding API
2. Store vectors in a vector DB
3. Query with a new embedding
4. Retrieve nearest neighbors

Good vector stores for a prototype

• Postgres + pgvector — simplest if you already use Postgres
• Supabase pgvector — very easy startup-friendly option
• Pinecone — managed and straightforward
• Qdrant Cloud — easy and solid
• Weaviate Cloud — good but a bit heavier
• Chroma — very easy locally for demos, less ideal long-term

Simplest stack overall

If you want minimal moving parts:

Option A: very simple MVP

• OpenAI embeddings
• Postgres + pgvector
• Your app server

This is probably the best “just get it working” stack.

Option B: fastest demo

• OpenAI embeddings
• Chroma locally
• Small app

Great for a prototype, but you may outgrow it.

Option C: managed end-to-end

• OpenAI embeddings
• Pinecone
• App server

Very low ops burden.

If you want to run embeddings locally

Use a small open-source model like:

• bge-small-en
• e5-small
• all-MiniLM-L6-v2

Run them with:

• sentence-transformers
• or Ollama for some models

Local pros

• Cheap
• Privacy
• No API dependency

Local cons

• More setup
• Quality may be lower than top hosted models
• Need to manage compute

My recommendation

For a startup prototype, I’d choose:

OpenAI embeddings + pgvector (Postgres)

or if you want the least ops possible:

OpenAI embeddings + Pinecone

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a recommended architecture
2. a minimal code example
3. a cost comparison
4. a decision tree based on your app type