As other have said (A) there are plenty of countermeasures you can take, but also (B) you are frustrated that you are providing something free to the public and then annoyed at the "wrong" customers are using your product and costing you money. I'm sorry, but this is a failure of your business model.
If we were to analogize this to a non-internet example:
(1) A company throws a free concert/event and believes they will make money by alcohol sales.
(2) A bunch of sober/non-drinking folks attend the concert but only drink water
(3) Company blames the concert attendees for "taking advantage" of them when they really just had poor company policies and a bad business model.
Put things behind authentication and authorization. Add a paywall. Implement DDOS and detection and banning approaches for scrapers. Etc etc.
But don't make something public and then get mad at THE PUBLIC for using it. Behind that machine is a person, who happens to be a member of the public.
Alternatively it could be seen that your juice company offers free samples. Then somebody abuses free and takes gallons home with them to bottle and sell as their own.
That’s what it feels like when someone is scraping your network to bootstrap a competitor.
Again, what you call abuse of free samples, someone else calls a savvy strategy tailored to you're poorly crafted business plan. Have ways to limit the free samples or else it's your fault...
There are certain classes of websites where the proposed solutions aren’t a great fit. For example, a shopping site hiding their catalog behind paywalls or authentication would raise barriers to entry such that a lot of genuine customers would be lost. I don’t think the business model is in general to be blamed here and it’s ok to acknowledge the unfortunate overhead and costs added by site usage patterns (e.g. scraping) that are counter to the expectation.
If we were to analogize this to a non-internet example: (1) A company throws a free concert/event and believes they will make money by alcohol sales. (2) A bunch of sober/non-drinking folks attend the concert but only drink water (3) Company blames the concert attendees for "taking advantage" of them when they really just had poor company policies and a bad business model.
Put things behind authentication and authorization. Add a paywall. Implement DDOS and detection and banning approaches for scrapers. Etc etc.
But don't make something public and then get mad at THE PUBLIC for using it. Behind that machine is a person, who happens to be a member of the public.