In 2022, production-grade vector databases were relying on in-memory storage at $2+ per GB, not counting the extra cost for durable disk storage. This is the most expensive way to store data. You can improve this by moving to disk, with triply replicated SSDs at 50% storage utilization which will run you $0.6 per GB. But we can do even better by leveraging object storage (like S3 or GCS) at around $0.02 per GB, with SSD caching at $0.1 per GB for frequently accessed data. Thatās up to 100x cheaper than memory for cold storage, and 6-20x cheaper for warm storage!
This is a great example of using napkin-math to find a market. Using your intuition about a market to identify a gap.