I priced out every piece of infrastructure for running CLIP-based image search on 1M images in production

GPU inference is 80% of the bill. A g6.xlarge running OpenCLIP ViT-H/14 costs $588/month and handles 50-100 img/s. CPU inference gets you 0.2 img/s which is not viable

Vector storage is cheap. 1M vectors at 1024 dims is 4.1 GB. Pinecone $50-80/month, Qdrant $65-102, pgvector on RDS $260-270. Even the expensive option is small compared to GPU

S3 + CloudFront: under $25/month for 500 GB of images

Backend: a couple t3.small instances behind an ALB with auto scaling. $57-120/month

Totals:

• Moderate traffic (~100K searches/day): $740/month
• Enterprise (~500K+ searches/day): $1,845/month