I’ve been looking at browser automation templates on marketplaces, and there’s a bunch of them—web scraping templates, form filling templates, lead generation workflows. The idea sounds great: buy a template, adjust it for your sites, done.
But I’m skeptical. In my experience, templates are usually built for a specific site or set of similar sites. When you try to use them on your own sites, the selectors don’t match, the flow doesn’t match your needs, and you end up rewriting most of it anyway. You spend as much time trying to adapt the template as you would building from scratch.
Maybe I’m just looking at the wrong templates, or maybe the customization process is better than I think. I’m curious: has anyone actually used a marketplace template and only made minor tweaks? Or is the reality that you’re essentially building your own thing with a template as a reference?
And if templates are mostly rewritten, is there actually value in the marketplace, or is it mostly a nice-to-have feature?