Fun fact: back in the day, Bingo Card Creator's "CMS" was a script which drove a mouse around the BCC swing applet, printed the card to a software PDF driver, opened it in Acrobat Reader, hit "Print Screen" on the keyboard, opened MS Paint, used dragging the mouse to hardcoded screen coordinates to crop the card, saved it as a GIF, and then put the GIF and PDF in subversion to be uploaded to the website later.
It worked well enough to justify learning Rails and Prawn to rewrite the whole thing server side, after which point I rm -rf'ed the directory that script was in and deleted the backup so that its vengeful shade would never trouble humanity again.
How much time did you lost over figuring out the recipe and scripting it?
Before I heard about configuration management, I had bash scripts to configure my server from clean state. I tried it locally hundreds of times to get every command right.
$150 for the script from somebody who did that thing for a living (apparently banks do this sort of hinge with regularity) and probably five hours lost to babysitting it and manually restarting when it hiccuped.
It worked well enough to justify learning Rails and Prawn to rewrite the whole thing server side, after which point I rm -rf'ed the directory that script was in and deleted the backup so that its vengeful shade would never trouble humanity again.