Seeing a useful app can make the next step feel obvious: reproduce its screens and charge a little less.
The screens are usually the most visible part of the business. They may be the least informative part of its advantage.
Work backward from the user’s situation
Write down the problem the competitor appears to solve. Then remove its interface from your notes. Can you describe a better result for a particular person without naming the competitor’s features?
Imagine a recipe organizer. One user needs a beautiful collection. Another needs to recover a family recipe from a blurry photo. A third needs to cook with one hand while holding a child. Those are different product briefs hiding under the same category label.
Investigate the invisible work
A polished demo doesn’t reveal support volume, content licensing, distribution relationships, moderation, recurring infrastructure costs or years of small reliability fixes. List which of those could matter to your version.
Inspect public information and your own authorized experience. Do not assume buying access gives you rights to copy the product’s code, private dataset, branding or creative assets.
Make the difference demonstrable
“Better UX” is an ambition. “The user can recover a readable recipe from this real photo in two steps” is a test. Find a task on which your proposed approach makes a meaningful difference and show it to the intended audience.
A lower price can be part of the offer, but calculate what it leaves for support and acquisition. Undercutting a product whose costs you don’t understand is an unusually enthusiastic way to create a job for yourself.
Use the competitor as evidence that somebody cares about a problem. Then investigate the people it doesn’t serve well. That is a more useful starting point than a pixel-perfect imitation.