What do you mean "free stuff". This isn't about giving potatoes away for free but about reducing margins and competing on price. "Your margin is my opportunity" seems to work well in many cases

I think Mastodon vs Bluesky is an example. Mastodon, being OSS developed in someone's spare time (I think he makes a meager salary off grants and donations now) is barely marketed. Bluesky, being a multi-billionaire's pet project, had plenty of marketing. As a result, everyone who complained about the lack of free speech on X still ignored Mastodon, the actually-free-speech-host-your-own-server-how-you-want-it platform, for an entire year, instead preferring to wait for Bluesky, the billionaire-owned-and-operated exact-copy-of-early-Twitter where a different billionaire still controls your speech, to come out instead.