Lowering costs to compete with the near free alternative makes your company a poor competitor in comparison to them. This is because you have much higher costs

Lowering costs to compete with the near free alternative makes your company a poor competitor in comparison to them. This is because you have much higher costs and probably are not sufficiently different to justify it. Options: 1. lower costs and essentially adopt the crowdsourced model 2. increase costs and quality and sell a premium product Either way, the main thing is that you have identified that you do not want to tread water.