[sasha-dv]

>... charge less as a possible strategy. Is this a good idea?

Usually not. Competing on price is almost always a bad idea. There are two exceptions to this rule I can think of:

1. Your "knockoff target" is the only game in town and because of that they are able to charge a lot.

2. Their service is expensive to run because their infrastructure costs a lot (lots of servers, expensive proprietary app stack, ...) while you're able to run your service on significantly less expensive infrastructure.

The better approach is to see what their existing customers are bitching about. Where's the bitching there's a problem in need of a solution (and an opportunity to make money).