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.
#155 of 200 in Embeddings.
On BEIR · Mean over task types · English, Paraphrase Multilingual MiniLM L12 v2 scores 33.4 vs 33.5 — 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.
Paraphrase Multilingual MiniLM L12 v2 is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from sentence-transformers, released Nov 2019.
Bge Base En v1.5 (better), NV Embed v2 (open weights).