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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

They are not a tech company. They are a regulatory capture company that uses tech to extract from the general public what should be free. The code and platform are the performance art to enable the rake.

Edit: Meant to scope this comment solely to TurboTax. Replies correcting me are well deserved.

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No, they are a tech company, they produce software for their main product.

Like a lot of companies, tech and not, they use their power and resources to keep their position.

The difference is that their actual competitor is the government. But that's also a big part of why private healthcare is way too expensive in the US, for worse results than other places.

> The difference is that their actual competitor is the government.

I think the government is more of an enabler, than a competitor. At least up until now.

It's a game of semantics. The other commenter's meaning is that a "tech company" would produce valuable tech that wouldn't otherwise exist. Intuit uses tech to do the opposite. McDonalds uses tech too, but they aren't a tech company.

McDonald's main product is not a piece of software. Intuit's is.

That's what I'm saying though, they don't even produce a product. They produce legislative influence to create a money collecting trap. Turboxtax isn't a "product" per se. That's like calling the mafia security guards because they force you to pay protection money. Many countries don't even require filling out tax forms. You just sign and pay.

I think most people would be shocked to learn how big intuit is in terms of market cap. Bigger than Verizon wellsfargo ibm nike

From comments in threads like this I think most people would be shocked that Intuit makes the largest segment of their income from business customers, not individual consumers.

Is this true for turbotax specifically, or merely for intuit as a whole (which includes things like quickbooks)?

The “business customer” is a slight misnomer because Intuits definition of this segment includes “Small Business and Self Employed”. Quickbooks accounts for thr largest share

For consumer segment TurboTax still drives 30% of their entire revenue.

For those unaware, Intuit owns...

TurboTax

Mint

QuickBooks

Credit Karma

MailChimp

They do own Mint, but they are killing it and trying to get customers to switch to Credit Karma. Intuit bought Mint but never really put much development effort into it beyond the bare minimum. Like too many financial tracking things which are "free", the user was the product on Mint that its advertisers wanted. I switched to Monarch which is paid and has some people from the original Mint team behind it.

and GitOps tool ArgoCD

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