In this sort of situation, it's always useful to ask what the cost of not automating the task at all is. That will give everyone a better feel for whether the automation makes sense, and how much developer time should be allocated to the project.

> Let's say I want you to get the fifth word of the fourth paragraph of the third column of the second page of the first edition of the local paper in a town to be determined. It's going to be a color, and we have a little deal with that paper to get our data plugged in every day. You can get the feed from their web site.

For the one-off case, I'd just go open up the paper and look for myself. Surely that'll be faster than trying to write some sort of a script to do it.

> Now I want you to be able to do this reliably every day for the next two years. I need this data on a regular delivery schedule and it can't rely on some human being there to constantly fine-tune things.

Ok. So now we're automating a 5 minute job that can be done by the office assistant, which will be performed 730 times. That puts the upper bound of time saved at around 120 hours of work. Due to their specialized training, software engineers probably cost the company more than 3x per hour than the assistant, so this automation task only makes sense if it can be completed in less than a week of work for the engineer, including maintenance over the next two years.

That sounds like a reasonable, but tight, time budget for the given task and reliability specifications. It's not an obvious win, which also means the ROI will be small. Also, there's opportunity cost to consider: that week of development time now can't be spent on other projects that may be more urgent.