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 MTEB German v1 · STS · German, Multilingual E5 Base scores 68.6 vs 68.7 — 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.
Multilingual E5 Large Instruct (better), Jina Embeddings v5 Text Nano (open weights).