Wasted 4 months training a chatbot on my own support tickets

I built a custom AI assistant to answer customer emails about my small repair shop in Portland. Spent close to $300 on API credits and hundreds of hours feeding it old tickets. Turns out the free version of a generic helpdesk bot did the same job in 2 days. Anyone else sink money into a custom model before trying the basic option?

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jake_chen16d ago

You said you fed it hundreds of hours of old tickets. That part stands out to me. What made you think your shop's past emails were special enough to need a custom model in the first place? I'm curious if there was something specific you saw in those tickets, like a weird pattern or local terms, that made you believe a generic bot wouldn't get it. Or was it more about wanting to build something yourself, and the time and money just got away from you? That's usually where I end up with projects like this.