What Elastiflow Learned Competing Against Expensive Incumbents and Free Alternatives

What Elastiflow Learned Competing Against Expensive Incumbents and Free Alternatives

Infrastructure startups face a brutal strategic problem: expensive enterprise vendors own the high end, open-source projects dominate the low end, and the middle ground appears nonexistent. Compete on features and you can’t match decades of incumbent development. Compete on price and you can’t beat free.

Most infrastructure companies get crushed in this squeeze. They’re too expensive compared to open source, too immature compared to incumbents, and lack a clear wedge to differentiate from either. The result is a grinding war of attrition few startups survive.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Robert Cowart, CEO and Co-Founder of Elastiflow, shared how they navigated this exact challenge in network observability—fighting expensive legacy players above and open-source alternatives below. Their survival strategy wasn’t about being better on either dimension. It was about finding a vector neither competitor could effectively address.

The Two-Front War

When Elastiflow entered the network visibility space, the competitive landscape looked impossible. At the high end sat established enterprise vendors with comprehensive feature sets, deep customer relationships, and pricing that reflected decades of accumulated value. These weren’t struggling incumbents—they owned their accounts completely.

At the low end, open-source projects provided basic network visibility functionality for free. Not free-with-asterisks. Actually free. Organizations could deploy these tools, get meaningful value, and never pay a dollar.

Between these extremes, Elastiflow had to carve out space. They couldn’t compete with incumbents on breadth—the feature gap was too wide. They couldn’t compete with open source on price—free is an unbeatable number. And positioning as “cheaper than incumbents but more expensive than free” isn’t compelling to anyone.

Robert’s initial experience with open source highlighted this challenge: “We had released a network flow collector as an open source project that was based on Elastic and Logstash and got a fair amount of traction with that.” The project worked. People used it. But monetization remained elusive. “One of the challenges with that is that it doesn’t necessarily build a business on its own and you need to figure out a way to monetize.”

This is the infrastructure startup dilemma in miniature: you can build things people use, but converting usage to revenue when free alternatives exist requires finding value that free can’t provide.

The Failed Positioning: Direct Competition

Elastiflow’s early positioning as a “network visibility” company put them in direct comparison with both incumbents and open source. Every sales conversation became a three-way shootout they couldn’t win.

Against incumbents, prospects would ask: “What features do you have that [established vendor] doesn’t?” The answer was inevitably inadequate. Incumbents had spent years building comprehensive capabilities. Elastiflow was a startup with a fraction of the resources and time.

Against open source, prospects would ask: “Why should we pay when we can use [open source project] for free?” Again, no good answer. If your commercial offering is just “open source plus a few features,” the value gap rarely justifies the price premium.

The positioning trapped them in unwinnable comparisons. As long as prospects evaluated Elastiflow against these alternatives, they’d find it wanting—not enough features to beat incumbents, not cheap enough to beat free.

The Escape Vector: Architectural Mismatch

Elastiflow’s breakthrough came from recognizing that both incumbents and open-source projects shared a fatal weakness: they were designed for infrastructure that was being replaced.

“What we saw was there’s a massive shift going on from traditional VM based and appliance based workloads to cloud native container and Kubernetes based workloads,” Robert explained. This wasn’t just market opportunity—it was competitive wedge.

Legacy enterprise vendors had built their products for traditional data center environments. Virtual machines. Physical appliances. Long-lived infrastructure with stable network topology. Their architectures assumed infrastructure that persisted rather than infrastructure that constantly churned.

Open-source projects, even recent ones, followed similar patterns. They were designed for deployment models and infrastructure assumptions that reflected how things worked before containers became standard.

The wedge emerged in Robert’s next observation: “The old way of doing things doesn’t work in these new environments.”

This wasn’t marketing hyperbole. It was technical reality. Tools designed for VM-based infrastructure genuinely struggled with containerized, ephemeral workloads. The architecture mismatch created gaps that neither expensive incumbents nor free alternatives could easily address.

The Rebuild Decision

Identifying the mismatch was one thing. Exploiting it required commitment most startups avoid: rebuilding from scratch rather than iterating on existing technology.

“We realized that to really effectively do observability for those types of environments, we need to build a solution that is designed from the ground up to actually run in those environments, be deployed with the same CICD, GitOps type automation tools that devops teams are used to using,” Robert explained.

This decision is harder than it sounds. Elastiflow had working technology. They had customers. They had momentum, even if it wasn’t in the right direction. Starting over meant abandoning accumulated work and betting everything on the cloud-native thesis being correct.

But the rebuild created differentiation impossible to achieve through iteration. Incumbents couldn’t start over—they had too much revenue tied to legacy approaches. Open-source projects couldn’t pivot quickly—they had communities and contributor bases built around existing architectures.

By building native to Kubernetes from the ground up, Elastiflow created a moat that neither expensive incumbents nor free alternatives could quickly cross. The architecture itself became competitive advantage.

The Positioning Pivot: Escaping Comparison

The architectural decision enabled a positioning shift that changed the competitive dynamics entirely. Instead of “network visibility” (which invited comparison to incumbents and open source), Elastiflow positioned as “cloud-native network observability.”

“We’ve also expanded our messaging to talk about cloud native network observability and network detection and response,” Robert shared. “That helps us from a marketing standpoint to better align with the problems that people are trying to solve.”

This wasn’t semantic games. The new positioning put Elastiflow in conversations where neither expensive incumbents nor free alternatives competed effectively.

Incumbents could claim Kubernetes support, but they weren’t cloud-native. The deployment model, the architecture, the integration patterns—everything signaled “legacy tool adapted for new infrastructure.”

Open-source projects could run on Kubernetes, but they lacked the enterprise features, security certifications, and support guarantees that organizations needed for production deployments.

Elastiflow positioned at the intersection: cloud-native architecture that actually worked the way Kubernetes environments operated, plus enterprise features that organizations needed to run it in production. Neither competitor addressed both dimensions effectively.

The Technology Wedge: eBPF as Differentiator

One particularly tactical aspect of Elastiflow’s competitive strategy involved emerging technologies like eBPF. Robert was candid about this: “eBPF is the latest, coolest buzzword that everybody wants to talk about. So being able to talk about how we use eBPF to provide that visibility definitely helps capture mindshare when we’re talking to prospects.”

eBPF matters because it represents the new way of doing infrastructure monitoring versus the old way. It’s not available in legacy tools built on older Linux kernels. And while open-source projects could theoretically implement it, doing so requires expertise and coordination that community development often lacks.

By building on eBPF from the start, Elastiflow created technical differentiation that widened the gap from both directions. Incumbents couldn’t easily add eBPF to legacy architectures. Open-source projects couldn’t quickly mobilize to build comprehensive eBPF-based solutions with enterprise features.

The Problem With the Middle Ground

What Elastiflow learned—and what matters for other infrastructure founders—is that the “middle ground” between expensive incumbents and free alternatives doesn’t actually exist unless you create new dimensions to compete on.

You can’t win by being “almost as good as incumbents but cheaper” because that’s not compelling enough to switch. You can’t win by being “better than open source but not free” because the price difference creates massive friction.

The only way to survive the squeeze is finding problems neither competitor solves well. For Elastiflow, that problem was cloud-native infrastructure monitoring. Incumbents solved it poorly because their architecture was wrong. Open source solved it poorly because the feature set was incomplete.

The Hybrid Motion as Competitive Response

Elastiflow’s sales motion—combining a free community edition with enterprise features—represents their strategic response to the two-front war.

“We have a product led growth motion where people can download and try our community edition free of charge,” Robert explained. This addresses the open-source comparison directly. Prospects can try before buying, reducing risk and friction.

But conversion happens through enterprise sales: “We’re primarily focused on direct selling. So we have an outbound motion. We also have a good amount of inbound that we get through our website, through people that are downloading and trying our community edition.”

The model acknowledges both competitive threats and creates paths to win despite them. The free tier neutralizes open source by providing similar try-before-you-buy benefits. The enterprise features create clear separation from both free alternatives and adapted incumbents who lack cloud-native architecture.

The Lesson About Differentiation

What emerges from Elastiflow’s experience is a principle for infrastructure startups facing similar squeezes: you can’t compete on existing dimensions where incumbents and open source dominate. You must find new dimensions where neither competes effectively.

For Elastiflow, that dimension was cloud-native architecture. Not just claiming Kubernetes support, but rebuilding entirely for how cloud-native infrastructure actually works. The commitment required—throwing away existing work and starting over—created differentiation impossible to replicate quickly.

Robert’s reflection on market dynamics captures this: “The old way of doing things doesn’t work in these new environments.” When you can identify contexts where both expensive incumbents and free alternatives genuinely fail, you’ve found your wedge.

The middle ground between expensive and free doesn’t exist in traditional competition. It only exists when you create new value dimensions that change what “expensive” and “free” mean. Elastiflow didn’t win by being cheaper than incumbents or better than open source on the same metrics. They won by being native to infrastructure where neither competitor’s approach worked well.

For infrastructure founders navigating similar competitive landscapes, that’s the path through: find the infrastructure transition where old architectures break, build native to the new paradigm before competitors adapt, and position in language that makes clear you’re solving problems neither expensive tools nor free alternatives address effectively.