What does an open-source multimodal AI stack cost?

What the bill is

A multimodal stack charges you in layers. The software license is one layer. Hosting the database is another. Storing video and images is another. Calling an embedding model or a language model is usually the one that surprises people, because it is billed by the model vendor, not by the database.

“Cheapest” is only meaningful after you name the layer. A free engine with an expensive model is not a free application. A hosted plan with no egress line is not an object-storage alternative.

How the layers split

Read a price by asking which layer it covers.

• Engine. An open-source build you run yourself has no license fee. You still pay for the machine, and for any model API the computed columns call.
• Hosted database. A cloud plan covers the database and an allowance of media and of database storage. Past an allowance, a plan either refuses more or bills the storage. Neither is a per-question charge.
• Your bucket. Pointing media at a bucket you already pay for does not add a second storage meter on the database plan. The bucket provider still bills you.
• Model APIs. Transcription, embeddings, and chat completions are the provider’s invoice. Caching a computed column avoids repeat calls for a row that has not changed. It does not make the first call free.

What this cost is not

This is not a ranking of the cheapest vector database, the cheapest CDN, or storage with no egress as a general object store. Those are different products. The numbers below are for this stack: a multimodal schema you can run locally, and the hosted plans that run the same schema.

What each plan includes. Model APIs are a separate invoice.

Where Pixeltable fits

Pixeltable's self-hosted engine is Apache 2.0. pip install pixeltable runs it on your machine with no account. Community is free: 1 cloud database, 50 GB of Media Store per organization, and 10 GB of database storage per database; the media is a hard limit. Nothing is billed. A database with no activity for 7 days stops, its services with it, and nothing is deleted; the next request to its catalog or one of its services, or pxt db start, starts it again in about 2 minutes. Pro is $29/month plus usage. It includes up to 3 cloud databases, 250 GB of Media Store per organization (then $0.05 / GB-mo), and 10 GB of database storage per database (then $0.80 / GB-mo).

Standard plans add no per-query or I/O meter, and managed media has no egress fee. Storage in a bucket you bring is not billed again by Pixeltable; your bucket provider still charges you. The current table is on the pricing page.

import pixeltable as pxt

TableModel = pxt.model_base()

class Docs(TableModel, name='docs'):
    document: pxt.Document

# Local, no account: pxt schema update app.py my_app
# The same class is what a cloud database runs.

Questions