We’re evaluating platforms that offer ready-to-use templates for common automation tasks, and the pitch is that you start from something battle-tested instead of building from scratch. That should save time and reduce the learning curve.
But I’m skeptical about how much you actually save if every template needs customization. If the template covers 60% of your use case and you have to manually build the remaining 40%, are you really saving significant time? Or are you just shifting the work around—instead of building everything from scratch, you’re now modifying a template, which might actually take longer if the template’s architecture doesn’t match your needs.
I’m trying to quantify the real time savings. Does starting from a template actually let you deploy faster than building custom, or is the time investment roughly the same but distributed differently? And more importantly, does that translate into cost savings, or does it just shift where the time gets spent?
What’s been your actual experience with templates? How much rework did you end up doing, and did it actually reduce your overall development time?