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.
#183 of 200 in Embeddings.
On BEIR-NL · Mean over task types · Dutch, LaBSE scores 19.5 vs 20.2 — about the same.
Released 2019-11-01. It is the current version in its line.
Yes, the weights are open (Apache-2.0 licence).
The weights are open and can be self-hosted; hardware needs are not confirmed yet.
LaBSE is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from sentence-transformers, released Nov 2019.
Multilingual E5 Large (better), Inf Retriever v1 (open weights).