There is no per-unit API price: self-host only.
There is no free API. The weights are open, so you can run it yourself.
#68 of 89 in Multimodal.
On MIEB Img · Image Classification · English, CLIP ViT L 14 Laion2B S32B B82K scores 81.2 vs 82 — about the same.
Released 2022-09-15. It is the current version in its line.
Yes, the weights are open (MIT licence).
The weights are open and can be self-hosted; hardware needs are not confirmed yet.
CLIP ViT L 14 Laion2B S32B B82K is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from laion, released Sep 2022.
EVA02 CLIP B 16 (better).