I Used OpenAI to Build a Searchable Metadata Archive of 791 Medium Articles … for 47 Cents in API…

📰 Medium · Programming

Learn how to build a searchable metadata archive of Medium articles using OpenAI and Python for under $1 in API costs

intermediate Published 6 May 2026

Action Steps

Collect Medium article URLs using Python
Use OpenAI API to extract metadata from articles
Build a searchable database using the extracted metadata
Configure API calls to optimize cost and performance
Test and refine the archive using sample queries

Who Needs to Know This

Developers and data scientists can benefit from this technique to organize and analyze large amounts of content, while product managers can apply this to improve content discovery and recommendation systems

Key Insight

💡 You can use OpenAI's API to extract metadata from large amounts of text data and build a searchable archive at a low cost