The upsells on TurboTax are getting a lot more shameless in recent years. I saw the exact same one pop up at least 2-3 times.
The one that really aggravated me though was the one at the end: after you FILE your taxes, they present this damned progress-bar looking thing as if you are somehow “not done” yet, as if this totally optional product sale is a required step!! No, no, no, that is just misleading garbage, and it is so annoying to have to constantly hunt around the page for the magic text to get around these things. I mean, I couldn’t even reach the page that lets me download my forms as PDF until I skipped this upsell.
What’s more, the product itself is getting more expensive but worse. On desktop, the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?) with all kinds of things unnecessarily hidden. On page after page, there is more than enough space to show everything but instead it’s giant white space everywhere; they HIDE things behind disclosure arrows, and with no logic whatsoever; e.g. on one page it shows the 2020 numbers by default but hides all the 2021 numbers behind arrows!?
Guess what isn’t an insultingly-small, truncated experience on desktop? The ads, the upsells. THOSE are full-page, taking full advantage of screen space and even scrolling off the edges.
Really shows their priorities.
One bright spot in all this pay-to-file-taxes game is the "Cash App Taxes" [0]. It is just great and seamless to file taxes for free even for a bit complex taxes such as RSU, Stocks, Virtual currency sales etc. Usually what I do is just progress on TurboTax until the end so I could calculate my estimated refund and then go ahead and file using Cash App Taxes and it just saved me $150 this year.
I've been using Credit Karma the last few years for taxes until they sold to Intuit, at which point their tax division went to cash.app. Initially I tried going with them until I realized that I had to download their app on my phone to even sign into the desktop to do my taxes (it was requesting I scan a QR code or something). I couldn't even access my previous tax returns that were stored on Credit Karma without downloading the cashapp to my phone. Eventually I caved, but only to contact their support to retrieve my returns and formally cancel my account.
I shouldn't need to download an app to a smartphone for something that I exclusively intend to use on a desktop. I went with FreeTaxUSA in the end.
I see where you're coming from here and mostly agree. However, I will say that as someone who already had the Cash App installed the process was pretty seamless. The only major item I would change is that it would be nice to have some way to import a CSV or XLS file (or even JSON) for the capital gains forms. They offer an online spreadsheet but you still have to fill out each cell individually. If you have a few dozen trades (or more) to report it gets rather tiresome and could even be a bit error-prone.
I suppose I could have scripted the data entry with keyboard macros (via xdotool[0]), but for something I only do once per year it probably wouldn't be worthwhile… and the interface could be different next year.