useful for adding semantic search to tiny bits of data, e.g. collections of research papers in a folder on my computer, etc.

for web stuff, e.g. community/forums/docs/small sites which usually don't even have 1M rows of data, precomputing embeddings and storing them and running on a small vector search like this somewhere is much simpler/cheaper than running external services

it's the operational hassle of not having to deal with a dozen+ external services, logins, apis, even if they're free

(I do like mixed bread for that, but I'd prefer it to be on my own lightweight server or serverless deployment)