I’ve been considering starting with a ready-made template for a login and data extraction workflow instead of building from scratch. The time-to-value sounds appealing, but I want to know what reality looks like.
In theory, a template handles the framework and you just plug in your site-specific details. In practice, I suspect templates cover the happy path and you end up tweaking selectors, adjusting timeouts, handling authentication edge cases specific to your target site. The question is how much of your time is actually spent on customization versus how much of the automation is genuinely reusable out-of-the-box.
For people who’ve gone this route, how much did you actually use the template as-is versus how much did you end up reworking?
Used a login template for three different internal systems. First site required minimal changes—just updated the CSS selectors for the login form and the success confirmation element. Did that in 15 minutes. Second site had an unusual authentication flow with a secondary verification step. The template didn’t anticipate that, so I added logic to handle it. That took about 45 minutes. Third site was straightforward again. Maybe 20 minutes of tweaks. So across three implementations, I’d say 30% of the effort was template-specific knowledge reuse and 70% was site-specific customization.
The template value is the architecture, not the specifics. The error handling patterns, the retry logic, the way it structures data extraction—that’s what you’re borrowing. The selectors and authentication details obviously need to be customized. I found that if the target site’s structure is similar to what the template anticipated, you’re done in minutes. If it’s structurally different, customization takes longer. But you’re refining an existing structure rather than inventing one, which does save time.
Templates save maybe 40% of time vs building from zero. U still need site specific tweaks but the framework is there. Not magic but better than starting empty.