Data & analytics · Self-hosted open model
Small self-hosted model replaced a big one for ticket tagging
● Worked
What happened
We tagged incoming tickets by product area with a large hosted model. It worked, but every ticket cost more than it needed to. We tried a small open model on one spare server with 1,000 labelled tickets as a test. It matched the big model on 96% of them, and the misses were tickets humans also argued about.
What it cost
From about €1,800 a month to one server we already had, plus a day of setup and a few hours a month of care.
What we fixed
We kept the big model as a fallback for tickets the small one is unsure about. That is about 5% of them.
The lessonTest a small model on your real data before you pay for a big one.
Reality numbers
- Team
- 51–200 people
- Monthly AI spend
- €100–1k
- Still running after 90 days
- yes