Our biggest competitor just launched our core feature for free. We lost 3 clients this week.

For the past year, we’ve been building a specialized SaaS tool. Our entire value proposition was a specific automated workflow that saved our users about 10 hours a week. We charged $49/month for it, and we had a solid base of 80 paying customers.

Then, on Tuesday, a massive, billion-dollar incumbent in our space announced their quarterly update. Buried in the release notes was the exact feature we built our entire company around. And they are offering it for free to anyone on their $10/mo enterprise plan.

By Friday, I had three cancellation emails in my inbox. All of them said some version of: "We love your tool, but we already pay for [Competitor], and it does this now, so we can't justify the extra $49."

I completely understand it from a business perspective. Why pay for a specialized tool when the all-in-one platform you already use just added it as a checkbox feature?

We are a small team, and we can't win a price war against a giant. We also can't out-market them. I know we need to pivot or find a new angle, but right now, it feels like the sky is falling.

For founders who have been "Sherlocked" by a massive competitor: How did you survive when your core feature became a commodity?

Did you pivot to an entirely new audience, double down on a niche they ignore, or shift to a services-based model? I need to figure out how to pivot the ship before our remaining runway runs out.