OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-small costs only about 1 dollar / 50 mio tokens.
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B is open-source
Also is Nomic, which is only 250 MB: https://ollama.com/library/nomic-embed-text/tags
Nomic is quite fast an can be used in Python via Ollama:
ollama.embeddings(model='nomic-embed-text', prompt='Hello world')Benchmarks for embeddings are often available at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard
Languages differences
Many embedding models are trained on multiple languages. Among them is: https://huggingface.co/intfloat/multilingual-e5-base also getting good results for german text.
Depending on the target language, consider a different embedding model.