I don't know about the trend, but one advantage of hiring a freelancer is knowing exactly who will be performing the work and the relationships are more likely to be personal. With an outsourcing company, that's less likely and the relationship is much more likely to involve pointing to contractual clauses and arguing over whether or not those clauses were met.<p>To me, competing on price is a sub-optimal approach to projects where the quality of results creates a lot of variation in the value of the work product. My experience is that relationships matter more over the long term, particularly for the kind of clients a service company or freelancer wants.<p>Good luck.