I’ve been thinking about this for a while. If templates save time and most automation work is repetitive, why isn’t there a bigger marketplace for browser automation templates?
Like, you could build a template for lead capture from landing pages, or price tracking, or form filling on SaaS trials. Someone would probably want to buy that. But I don’t see a ton of people actually selling these things.
Is it a technical barrier? Cost? Does the market just not care? Or is the real issue that customization is always so specific to each use case that a generic template isn’t worth paying for? I’m trying to figure out if there’s actually demand for this or if I’m overthinking it.
The barrier is mostly that automation work is too specific to be valuable as a template for most people. A lead capture template that works for one SaaS product needs significant changes for another because the page structure is always different.
What sells better is expertise, not templates. Someone will pay for consultant time to build automation specific to their site, but a generic template has limited value. The exception is if you’re selling within a specific niche where page structures are standardized—like automation for a particular CRM or ecommerce platform.
The marketplace exists for specific use cases where standardization actually works. General browser automation templates don’t translate well.
The main issue is that browser automation templates require so much site-specific configuration that the buyer ends up doing almost as much work as building from scratch. A template for extracting data from news sites looks completely different from extracting data from ecommerce sites, even though they’re both extraction tasks.
Marketplaces work when templates address a specific, standardized problem. General automation is too broad. You’d see more success selling templates targeted at specific platforms or industries where the page structure is known and consistent.
customization overhead is real. most templates need heavy modifiction that buyers end up doing 70% of the work themself. marketplace works better for highly specific use cases, not genral automation.