It's possible you can't compete, but you shouldn't just assume it. Based on my admittedly limited experience hiring people on these freelancing platforms, the majority of contractors are terrible. Even ones with 5-star average ratings can be completely incompetent.

Thus, for one recent project, I could have chosen from a dozen C++ programmers, all highly rated, charging around $10/hour, but I went straight for the guy charging $60/hour. He did the job perfectly in 7 hours. My hunch, based on past experience, is the alternative would have been days and days of sorting through disappointing results from 3 or 4 different $10/hour jokers before finally giving up.

I would be very interested in a platform that somehow performed real quality control and only accepted people charging a minimum of $50/hour, so that I was virtually guaranteed to only deal with competent professionals who would reliably deliver.