There is no per-unit API price: self-host only.
There is no free API. The weights are open, so you can run it yourself.
#135 of 200 in Embeddings.
On RTEB French beta · Mean over tasks · multilingual (2 languages), Sentence Croissant Alpha v0.4 scores 29.7 vs 30.1 — about the same.
Released 2024-04-27. 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.
Sentence Croissant Alpha v0.4 is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from manu, released Apr 2024.
Qwen 3 Embedding 8B (better), Nemotron 3 Embed 8B BF16 (open weights).