alt Hacker NewsNah, "Any other vector DB" starts to fall apart once you need stuff like scripted scoring like OP uses. Then it starts to be a question of, "do you need ANN for performance?" since SQLite only does brute-force vector scoring. And granted, brute-force is performant for far more vectors than most people give it credit for, but it definitely hits a wall well below 1 million if you want it to have webpage-type latency.
Maintaining Elasticsearch isn't free, but picking an underpowered db and having to port to the right one is also quite time consuming.
it's also an odd situation to say a tabular database can replace a document store .. sure, it can, but that's not good practice from my point of view
also, I've run ES on an old laptop and it worked really well, so the cost of it can be pretty low if you're still in development