There is no per-unit API price: API price not public.
There is no free API. The weights are open, so you can run it yourself.
#114 of 200 in Embeddings.
On MTEB English v2 · Pair Classification · English, E5 Small v2 scores 84.8 vs 84.8 — about the same.
Released 2024-02-08. 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.
E5 Small v2 is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from intfloat, released Feb 2024.
EmbeddingGemma 300M (better), QZhou Embedding (open weights).