There is no per-unit API price: price not verified.
#124 of 200 in Embeddings.
On JMTEB v2 · STS · Japanese, Multilingual E5 Small scores 80.2 vs 80.2 — 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 Small is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from intfloat, released Feb 2024.
EmbeddingGemma 300M (better), Ja Embed Sts (open weights).