The only piece of advice I'd give is to avoid anything which uses a bearing guided cutter like the plague - try to find one which uses a collar instead.
I had an axminster jobbie with the bearing guided cutter, which came with a helpful slip of paper telling me to "keep firm downwards pressure". It turns out that for the stock I was using there was only a few millimeters of contact on the bearing and the template, so one small lapse in concentration and I mangled the aluminium template
.
The worst thing is that I ordered a replacement template and did exactly the same thing a few days later ](*,).
The trend and CMT offerings are much better, but also more pricy, but by the time you've ruined your first template (or two) the cost is pretty much the same