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.
#113 of 200 in Embeddings.
On BEIR · Mean over tasks · English, Multilingual E5 Base scores 48.9 vs 49 — 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.
Multilingual E5 Base is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from intfloat, released Feb 2024.
Bge Base En v1.5 (better), NV Embed v2 (open weights).