I’ve been hearing a lot about ready-to-use templates speeding up the initial setup for browser automation workflows. The claim is basically that you can grab a template for login + data extraction, customize it for your specific site, and be running in under an hour without writing any code.
I’m skeptical because from my experience, every site’s authentication works slightly differently and form structures vary wildly. A template might cover 70% of what I need, but I always end up spending hours on edge cases and site-specific quirks anyway. So I’m wondering if people who use these templates are actually seeing real time savings, or if they’re just shifting the work around rather than eliminating it.
What’s your honest experience been with templates? Do you use them as-is or do you always end up customizing heavily?
Templates save time, but not in the way you might think. They’re not meant to be drop-in solutions for every site. They’re starting points that handle the boilerplate part—the basic login flow structure, form handling patterns, data extraction logic.
The real savings is in not having to figure out the architectural pattern from scratch. You don’t rebuild the error handling, retry logic, or workflow structure each time. You inherit those from the template. The customization you do—adapting selectors for your specific site, adjusting field names—doesn’t take hours because the framework is already there.
I’ve gone from 8-10 hours to set up a new automation from zero to about 1-2 hours using a template. The difference is the thinking work is done. You’re filling in specifics, not designing the entire system.