Hello community. I built an automation system for a Spanish magazine that processes PDF articles and publishes them to Drupal. Looking for feedback on what something like this should cost.
Scope:
- Processes ~40 PDF articles/month
- Saves ~18 hours/month of manual work (30min → 2-3min per article)
- Built with n8n (21-node workflow), Claude Vision API, Drupal JSON:API
What it does:
- Detects new PDF in Google Drive
- Claude Vision extracts: title, author, section, lead, content, magazine issue, featured quotes
- Transforms content to HTML, splits by H3 tags into separate sections
- Maps PDF sections to Drupal taxonomies (built custom mapping logic with defaults)
- Creates multiple paragraph entities in Drupal (one per section)
- Searches for author, categories, section, magazine UUIDs in parallel
- Creates complete article with all relationships
- Moves file to completed/error folders, sends email notifications
Technical challenges solved:
- Dual taxonomy mapping (web categories vs print sections don't match 1:1)
- Content splitting by regex for modular paragraphs (enables future image insertion)
- Claude prompt engineering for consistent JSON output
- Error handling with defaults and notifications
- Parallel API calls to Drupal
Development time: ~2 weeks (including Postman testing, prompt refinement, error handling)
Current status: Tested with 3 PDFs, ready for production
What would you charge for something like this? Trying to understand market rates for workflow automation + AI integration projects.
Thank you very much!