I keep seeing template marketplaces for browser automation tasks—web scraping, form filling, checkout bots, that kind of thing. The pitch is that you save time by starting with something pre-built instead of blank canvas.
But I’m skeptical about how much time you actually save. If a template is generic enough to work across multiple sites, doesn’t that mean it’s also so generic that you’ll spend hours tweaking selectors, adjusting logic, and debugging things that don’t match your specific site structure?
I tried using a web scraping template once and ended up rewriting half of it anyway because my site had quirks the template didn’t anticipate.
So the real question: are templates just a nice-to-have marketing thing, or have they actually reached a point where they meaningfully speed up development for non-standard use cases?
What’s your experience? Do templated automations actually save you time, or do you end up doing almost as much work as if you’d built from scratch?
Templates are genuinely useful, but only if they match your actual use case closely enough. Generic templates that claim to work everywhere? Yeah, those are mostly marketing.
The templates that work are the ones targeting specific actions. Like, a template specifically for “login to Shopify, extract product data, save to CSV.” That template understands Shopify’s page structure, the expected selectors, the data format you want. You bring your own Shopify store URL and it works.
Compare that to a generic “web scraper” template that tries to work on any site. You’d definitely rewrite half of it.
For your use case, the question is whether there’s a template targeting your specific scenario. If there is, you’re not customizing much—mostly credentials and URLs. If it’s a generic template, yeah, you’re doing real work.
What changed for me was thinking of templates as starting points for specific workflows, not generic solutions. I use a template for Shopify scraping, another for LinkedIn data collection, another for form filling. Each one is built for that workflow.
The time savings compound because you’re reusing templates across similar projects.