A competitor force-migrated its users today. Here is what we did instead of gloating

Bolt.new retired its v1 agent this morning. Every remaining v1 project auto-switched to their new agent. They handled it well (long notice, nothing breaks, history preserved), but a forced migration is still the single strongest switching trigger that exists. Nobody re-evaluates their stack because your ad told them to. They re-evaluate when their vendor changes something underneath them.

We build in the same space (AI app builder), so I want to share what we did with this moment, because I think the playbook generalizes.

1. We wrote the comparison our competitor's users are actually searching for, and made it honest. Not a hit piece. Our page ranks Bolt's genuine strengths (real in-browser dev environment, great for developers), says plainly that most people should stay if it is working, and lists real pricing for all 7 tools including the cons of ours (newer platform, smaller community). Honest comparisons convert better than rigged ones because the reader can feel the difference, and they get shared instead of screenshotted.

2. We open-sourced the underlying research. The spreadsheet we kept on every builder in the category (pricing model, output stack, export policy) is now a public GitHub list that includes all our rivals, with PRs welcome: https://github.com/umairalisadaqat/awesome-ai-website-builders. A resource that includes your competitors earns links and trust that a marketing page never will.

3. We did not touch the panic. No "Bolt is dying" content. Their migration was actually smooth, and saying otherwise would burn credibility with exactly the audience we want.

The takeaway for any indie hacker: keep a running, honest map of your competitive landscape. When a switching moment hits (repricing, acquisition, forced migration, shutdown), you can publish something genuinely useful within hours instead of scrambling to write an ad.

The comparison page, if you want to see the format: https://we.inc/alternatives/bolt-alternatives?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_content=bolt-alternatives (and the product itself is free to try at https://my.we.inc/signup?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_content=bolt-alternatives if you are curious what we ship).

Has anyone else caught a competitor's switching moment like this? What worked?