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Comment by hedayet | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had frustrating experiences with TurboTax due to its overly complex interface, aggressive data collection under the guise of saving money (which it doesn’t deliver), and a convoluted pricing structure that rivals the IRS’s own complexity.

I hope this initiative is good enough to enable domain experts and good people to build transparent, user-friendly alternatives to challenge TurboTax’s market grip.

Has anyone encountered promising tools or approaches that tackle these pain points?

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DirectFile was quite good for the one year I was able to use it and addressed your concerns. Don't worry, that's since been taken care of.

https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-tax-returns-free-...

I can totally see the minds running TurboTax spending a lot of money to make this happen.

Intuit spent $3.8 million on lobbying against Direct File in 2023, HR Block another $3 million. In total, the tax prep industry has spent $93 million lobbying against the Free File program since 2003 (through 2023, couldn't find a more recent source).

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/02/turbotax-maker-intu...

It's sad to see how little money needs to be spent to make the lives of millions of tax payers more miserable.

Just goes to show how cheap our politicians really are. In both heart and bank.

Not "our politicians", republicans

Democrats keep trying to make taxes in America better, including prominent democrats literally calling for the investigation of Intuit's bribery here.

Then people elect republicans.

Independent analysis of official state reports contradicts you. It’s easier to look at states than to analyze which federal rep submitted which amendment or rider

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/worst-run-stat...

That's $3 million of direct, fully disclosed funding. There are many other ways of bribing officials, and it gets easier every day.

Just a heads up, your URL 404’s

Thanks. Fixed. I stripped what I thought was a tracker without testing.

The fun part is you can change the text before what you thought was tracking to anything you want:

http://apnews.com/article/apnews-declares-trump-stupid-4bb0b...

This is true about a lot of sites and I'll often remove the unimportant part when saving or sharing urls for brevity sake. E.g.

https://apnews.com/article/4bb0bca02fab9b3d06ae6f45ac67b7ab

This is true for most news websites as well as online shopping sites

I used Cash App Taxes last year (after years of H&R Block and TurboTax before that), and it worked great and covered all my needs which are more complex than the average tax filer. 100% free.

I file in multiple states and unfortunately Cashapp taxes said it doesn't support that use case the last time I tried. Freetaxusa worked great though.

FreeTaxUSA is legitimately fantastic!

I love em, I don’t know why anybody uses TurboTax. Good product, generous freemium model with transparent pricing

I've used freetax for the past couple years. My then-girlfriend's tax situation got more complicated when she accepted tuition money from a trust fund. TurboTax wanted her to pay for the small business edition to covered the necessary forms which happened to cost more than her refund. I threw everything into freetax and only had to pay for the state filling.

TurboTax’s advertising is borderline fraudulent in my opinion.

Freetaxusa.com (no affiliation) is just as good and legitimately free.

Note: Freetaxusa.com has not done a good job with Form 3921 (ISO grant exercises) and AMT carryover. If you have exercised ISO grants or later sold stock purchased in years in which you paid AMT, do not use freetaxusa.com. You will lose more in tax costs vs. finding a real CPA willing to go through your nuanced math.

I used Free Fill Fillable Forms last year for both federal and state. I honestly don't know why I didn't try them sooner. It sounds daunting, filling out your own returns, but it was quite painless for my situation.

combined with excel1040 this is the way to go imho

The H&R Block software is better imo.

Cash App Taxes

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