Three years using FreeTaxUSA, it’s excellent. First year had some learning curves coming from TurboTax but it’s as good, if not better and not a scam with dark patterns.
FreeTaxUSA is excellent, but we shouldn’t have to use it.
Taxes having third party companies being just about the only way to file electronically would be like if you could only vote at selected partner businesses like Walmart or Target and you had to pay to vote for state level candidates unless you went through a process that took twice as long and involved leaving the store and going somewhere else to do it all over again.
Yep, FreeTaxUSA is what I've been using for the last 5 years. Reasonably priced & their forms are good for my fairly uncomplicated setup (W-2, 1099, a few other miscellaneous forms). Bounced off TurboTax & TaxACT years ago because they were too pricey & pushy about upgrades.
are there any Free Software tax programs that are kept up to date with tax codes? I would so prefer not to have a for-profit company handling my taxes.
It's a piece of software I've developed that is not publicly released, but eventually will be and will be AGPL3.
A few other people have also written such software. One guy still maintains it and surprisingly wrote a whole IRS / 1040 library in C. Mine is more oriented towards business and employer related taxes, though, than personal / investment sort of tax forms (although it will do the latter).
Biggest weakness is it will only support 1 or 2 states because I don't have the resources to make an accurate system for all 50.
I used cashapp's free tax software and it was pretty good. Similar quality to TurboTax but free. I had regular W-2 income, a whole lot of 1040 forms, and an S-1 form from some ETFs.
Anyone else thinks that sounds hopelessly optimistic?