I’ve been reading about the idea of developing automation templates, customizing them for your specific use case, and then selling them back to the community on a marketplace as a way to offset migration costs.
Sounds good in theory. You migrate to a new BPM stack, optimize your workflows through the process, and then monetize that knowledge by selling templates to others doing the same migration. That could meaningfully improve the ROI if it actually works.
But I’m trying to figure out if this is real behavior or if it’s mostly aspirational. Are people actually building sellable templates? How do you even determine what’s worth selling—is it just workflows that solve a common problem, or does it need to be more polished than that? And what’s the actual revenue picture? Are templates a meaningful income stream, or is someone selling 2-3 templates and then giving up because the effort-to-payout ratio is terrible?
I’m also wondering about the maintenance burden. If you sell a template and then your business evolves and you find bugs in it or need to update it for API changes, are you obligated to maintain it? Does that turn into customer support hell?
For the migration business case, I’m trying to calculate how much template revenue could realistically offset licensing and implementation costs. But I need some real numbers from people who’ve actually tried this.