We’re building Wetime AI, a travel-specific AI architecture designed to offer personalized recommendations at scale—without the pricing and opacity of generic LLM APIs.
The cost of using commercial LLMs (like OpenAI’s) for real-world applications—especially in verticals like travel—is a major barrier. Most APIs are priced per token, which becomes extremely expensive and hard to predict at scale.
So, we ran a comparative analysis of three approaches:
OpenAI API (gpt-4o-mini)
Self-hosted open-source (LLaMA 3.1 1B on AWS)
Our own specialized travel AI (Wetime)
Result: At 1 million requests/month:
OpenAI: ~$2,830
Wetime: ~$230–$410 → That’s a 10x–100x cost efficiency gain depending on complexity.
We’ve just received a grant from the Camino Network Foundation (a blockchain built for travel) to accelerate this infrastructure—making our architecture not just efficient, but also transparent and verifiable through on-chain data provenance.
We're going live with our Camino validator node this Friday and launching a Chrome extension for itinerary generation next. Curious to hear your thoughts—especially if you're building in vertical AI, travel tech, or decentralized data infra. AMA.
—Sietse CEO, Wetime AI