I did say the index, not the embeddings themselves. The index is a more compact representation of your embeddings collection, and that's what you need in memory. One approach for indexing is to calculate centroids of your embeddings.
You have multiple parameters to tweak, that affect retrieval performance as well as the memory footprint of your indexes. Here's a rundown on that:
https://tembo.io/blog/vector-indexes-in-pgvector
Tried and deployed in production with similar sized collections.
You only need enough memory to load the index, definitely not the whole collection. A typical index would most likely fit within a few GBs. And even if you need dozens of GBs of RAM it won’t cost nearly as much as $20k/month as the article surmises.
