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.
#190 of 200 in Embeddings.
On MTEB English v2 · Retrieval · English, Distilrubert Small Cased Conversational scores 7.1 vs 7.5 — about the same.
Released 2022-06-28. It is the current version in its line.
Yes, the weights are open (not specified licence).
The weights are open and can be self-hosted; hardware needs are not confirmed yet.
Distilrubert Small Cased Conversational is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from DeepPavlov, released Jun 2022.
EmbeddingGemma 300M (better), Yuan Embedding 2.0 En (open weights).