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- Intuit's revenue was $14.4 billion last year. An app making "millions" per month is a drop in the bucket.

- Intuit paid $4.7 billion for Credit Karma, and only $170M for Mint.

- Credit Karma had expected revenues of $1.5 billion in 2021. (https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/05/how-credit-karma-acquired-...)

- We don't know how much it cost (in time and money) to keep Mint running.

Mint has to be expensive to run. Maintaining all those hacked together data feeds that are constantly breaking can't be easy.

I can't believe that they make so much on a tax product. The govt should really step in and make this free and easy.

Just a nit: Nearly 2/3rd of that revenue comes from non-TurboTax products.

Oh interesting. Do you know what the breakdown is of the non tt products?

https://businessquant.com/intuit-revenue-breakdown-by-segmen... https://investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2022/Intuit-R...

The big one is Quickbooks, which most small businesses use for basic accounting.

yeah quickbooks is BIG.

The vast majority of Intuit's revenue comes from products for small businesses (e.g. Quickbooks).

The govt should never be allowed to make tax software. They should make an easy interface for reporting taxes, but never make any tax management software. It is too huge a conflict of interest to let the same organization that complicates taxes profit from selling you software to simplify your taxes. And by profit, I don't just mean the $ price tag of the software. The parent said it should be "free". Presumably they meant free as in beer. But free as in freedom involves a lot more than that. More than "open source", too.

If you want the govt to make tax management simple, have them simplify the tax code.

Let's look at an example: sales tax. How many people do you know that have software for managing their sales taxes? They track how much they spent on food vs medical supplies etc.? They track that spending across all the different merchants, and across different tax districts so they can prove that their aggregated spending crossed a certain threshold to qualify for a different tax bracket. They quantify how much was for the local charitable food drive so they can take deductions.

No, wait. Nobody does any of that. They just walk up to the checkout stand and pay for their purchases. Now, merchants on the other hand, do have to manage sales tax. They might need simple software for that. It should not come from the government.

> Presumably they meant free as in beer. But free as in freedom involves a lot more than that

What does it involve?

The government already has a computeTax implementation that they use to verify that your return is correct. We're just asking them to give everyone else access to it. Not really sure what freedoms are harmed.

That's kind of my point. Why do we need to file a tax return at all if the government already knows everything? Why should we ever get a return? Did you ever get a sales tax return?

> Why do we need to file a tax return at all if the government already knows everything?

Most people wouldn't need to, because the government knows most tax-relevant information about most people at tax time. But it doesn't know everything about everyone. So it seems you're driving at

> If you want the govt to make tax management simple, have them simplify the tax code.

Presumably you mean get rid of all the different types of deductions and credits that can affect your taxes and only become known to the government at tax time.

That's easy to say, but really hard to do. Close to impossible. Rewrites of codebases are generally a bad idea. The tax code is also a codebase (more of a specification, but whatever). Only it's a codebase written by politicians and their staff and lobbyists. Imagine how much time you spend at work arguing about stupid shit, and everyone involved is technical. Now imagine the same discussion with non-technical people and voters and TV ads.

> Why should we ever get a return? Did you ever get a sales tax return?

It's called a refund. A return is the paperwork you file.

> I can't believe that they make so much on a tax product. The govt should really step in and make this free and easy.

Unpopular opinion, but I think it's a great product and I enjoy using it every year. Pricing is a bit steep, but let's not pretend like TurboTax doesn't have fantastic UX. As an FE, I have always held their design org in high regard. And I can't possibly imagine a government agency doing better.

Personal tax software and solutions should be freely available. Intuit legally bribes politicians in the USA to go against a simple and free tax solutions, like most 1st world counties. I cannot support or endorse them by any means.

Intuit requires manually entry while the governing bodies like IRS or your state treasury already has that information and can per-populate the information. This feature would be great and reducing input errors and wasted time on redundancy. Taxes are already paying for this automation at the those entities. Why not just add on the last mile?

Last time I used Intuit, it was littered with delayed transactions timers to social engineer the idea that, "the tax system is complete and our software is working extra hard to get you the best tax breaks." Just filling out the forms and submitting the digitally takes a little more time than Inuit's manual entry system and worth it for not funding Intutit's legal political bribes.

I get all of that, the company is evil and so on. I just think it's a good product.

"We’re still lost, but we’re making very good time!" -George Lichty, 1947

> As an FE, I have always held their design org in high regard. And I can't possibly imagine a government agency doing better.

I'm always so conflicted because the flow is really nice but I feel so patronized the entire time. I'm half expecting next year's TurboTax to have skinner-box mechanics plagiarized from mobile games.

How much they paid for Mint vs CK has little bearing. Google bought youtube for 1.6b and Motorola for 12b (later sold for 3b) - Which would you rather focus on today?

I dont disagree Mints revenue is not enough currently, but thats the issue. Mint has 3.6 million MAU. Maybe I need to be more explicit, but the value of a financial services user is high, not just in immediate revenue but also in referred revenue. Mint has never done a good job at pricing their product. Ive used it for 15 years and have never paid them a dollar. Thats a failure on their part, as I would have gladly paid monthly or yearly for the past 15 years. Even if I didnt, there were tons of products I would have IAP'd for that could have been seamlessly integrated into mint. Instead they seem entirely focused on trying to get me to sign up for credit cards or to switch bank accounts. What a lost opportunity.

As for the how much it costs to operate mint, thats true we dont know exactly what it is. But I am not a ostrich with my head in the sand. I can infer that the cost is going to be magnitudes less than the revenue it brings in, even in its current sad state. This isnt a chatgpt startup thats using insane resources on metal or developers to offer a product. Its a application suite that processes and coorelates data provided by plaid.com - Mint doesnt even do any of the heavy lifting anymore.

> The app has to be capable of generating millions a month in revenue at the least. Who is on the leadership team for mint, so I know to never work or partner with them in the future? This is so insanely incompetent its just.. shocking.

I have the opposite perspective: management made the right call pulling the plug on Mint. The problem with Mint is that it most likely loses a huge amount of money; from what I've read, most data aggregators charge a fixed amount per account + a fee per API call, so they have to recuperate their costs by selling ads.

That's why Credit Karma makes money: credit card/loan/insurance referrals are worth insane amounts (I've heard numbers like $100+ per sign up for premium cards, even more for insurance/mortgage), so it only makes sense to shuffle customers over to Credit Karma where the sales funnel is much more effective. If one credit card referral can pay for the customer's API calls for a few years, it only makes sense to aggressively push for it.

Absolutely.

I've seen life insurance referral fees at over $1000 per successful application.

Auto Insurance, when the market is soft (which it isn't right now), can sell at well over $100 per CLICK for premium consumers.

"Skype" didn't fall asleep and do nothing. It got reworked into a new platform. Microsoft Teams is used by like 280M users, roughly the same size as Zoom. Google Meet has ~100M users.

Its great that Microsoft has teams- but nothing to do with skype as a consumer front-facing product.

Years ago, Skype was the de-facto solution for video calls and video meetings. There was no zoom, there was no google meet. Skype was so known for video chat that it was a verb. 'Skype me'

Skype absolutely and completely fell asleep at the wheel and wholesale abandoned the public market to Zoom, Discord and Google. Its not like it happened overnight either. Skype had the ability to respond to these guys but instead did almost nothing after a redesign to 'skype 8' in 2018.

I cant exclaim how astronomical a failure it is to go from being the defacto verb for video calls and instant messaging to not even having 5% of the end-user consumer market anymore. It would be like if people stopped using google for search, or youtube for videos. You dont get to say "Yeah well google got reworked into gsuite which has 300m users" - Its still a failure of biblical proportions.

They should have been capable of creating a enterprise product and keeping their consumer offering going.

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Just to be clear, I understand teams is large and doing well. Its also a enterprise product and it has nothing to do with what im talking about above. Discord (~20b valuation) only exists because Skype did zero updates or innovation for years.

As far as I know Skype and Microsoft Teams are separate platforms, currently coexisting though the business parts of Skype are slowly being phased out in lieu of Teams.

Skype and Microsoft Teams (Personal) can message each other, its essentially the same platform.

>This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.

Wouldn't a start-up competitor need to enter (and then grow) the space in order for this to be a failure like that?

If it's such a potentially lucrative product, then why have the myriad of VC-funded challengers languished?

I think in reality, Mint.com is a classic niche product where a small set of competent users (the kind you see on HN) love it, but most people just don't see a need for it.

The Intuit management are doing exactly what they seek to do. The company is nothing more than a pure rent-seeker. Yay, rentier capitalism!