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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

What's the least scammy alternative to TurboTax? I keep paying for it every year because it's what I'm used to, and I have capital gains and all that junk so I can't free file.

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Don't know how this isn't mentioned already, but I've used FreeTaxUSA for the last two years, and I've really enjoyed it. It does not hold your hand as much as TurboTax, but they'll walk you through every step. I still pretty easy to use, plus it's rather affordable.

https://www.freetaxusa.com/

Torrent turbotax, run it in a VM without net access, and physically mail your tax return in. Or if your figures are relatively simple, just fill out the forms yourself. It helps to know how the formulas work out for tax avoidance purposes, anyway.

Man, that was savage!

You can pay a tax professional for about the $100 that turbo tax apparently charges.

There is an OSS tax solver here: https://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

Only does IRS, not state, works fine for me so far.

For some reason that link doesn't work foe me (may be a DNS issue on my part). Appears to be here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver/

And it does seem to have a few states, at least in text form.

The link needs http:// to work. In 2020 Sourceforge doesn't host project webpages on https.

http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

I've been using Taxfyle recently. It can be a little more expensive but saves time since all you have to do is upload forms for a CPA to fill out. There's also TaxAct if you want to do it yourself. I refuse to give money to Intuit.

I'll put in a good word for https://olt.com

I've been using them for years. It would cost most people $10-20 for fed 1040a and state taxes, extra help is available for extra money. In an income tax-free state I paid $0 to file my federal return and have it direct deposited to my bank account. No dark patterns.

And their privacy policy was decent. I was not happy with what I saw on Intuit's site, especially given the data I'd be trusting them with.

CreditKarma lets you file capital gains and so on for free.

And they're getting bought by Intuit (TurboTax)...

Make sure to opt out of personal info sharing before doing this. There's a subtle disclosure permitting selling info to affiliates before enrolling in their tax program that can be declined (it looks required at first glance but isn't).

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