Show HN: I built an AI travel planner after wasting 6 hours on Reddit I'm a dev who got tired of wasting entire evenings planning trips. After the 10th time finding myself with 50 tabs open at 2 AM reading contradictory blog posts, I built Voyaige. What it does: Enter a city + your travel style (budget backpacker, luxury, foodie, etc.) → get a personalized PDF guide in ~15 minutes. Not generic "Top 10" lists—actual itineraries with opening hours, transport tips, and recommendations that match YOUR preferences. Why Perplexity over GPT/Claude: Perplexity's Deep Research API was the game-changer. It actually cites real sources and pulls fresh data. GPT-4 kept giving me outdated restaurant recommendations from 2021. Perplexity searches, synthesizes, and cites—perfect for travel where accuracy matters. Tech stack: - Laravel backend with queue workers for long-running generation - Perplexity Deep Research API for research + synthesis - Custom PDF generation (tried DOMPDF, settled on Browsershot + headless Chrome) - Polar for payments (Stripe rejected me 3 times as "travel content") Hardest technical challenges: 1. API response quality: Prompt engineering to get consistent structure across different cities/personas 2. PDF layout: Making 25-page guides that actually look good and are readable on mobile 3. Queue management: Handling generation failures gracefully + retry logic 4. Payment processors: Finding one that accepts "AI-generated content" businesses Questions for HN: 1. Would you pay $13 to skip 3-5 hours of research? 2. What would justify higher pricing? 3. How do you feel about AI-generated travel advice vs. human travel bloggers? Link: https://voyaige.io Happy to discuss or answer any questions! https://voyaige.io December 11, 2025 at 01:55AM
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Thanks for your interest