Things like backdoor Roth contributions (which aren't that exotic, tbh) were very confusing in credit karma, to the point where I actually did my taxes with another service just to verify that the calculations were correct, then submitted with CK. I found several mistakes in the CK results that were due to bad/confusing UI.
You likely won't hit this problem if you're just doing a 1040EZ or 1040 with standard deduction, no stock sales, etc. But if you have any complications...sometimes there's a reason to pay for software.
(definitely not defending Intuit here, though. Tricking people into paying is not cool.)
> Intuit Inc., owner of the popular TurboTax DIY tax preparation service, has moved forward with its $8.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma, Inc., after satisfying the government’s requirement that Credit Karma divest its tax preparation business.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/anticompetitive-concern...
Divest their tax prep business? I just did my taxes on creditkarma, and it was the same website that was trying to market me credit cards that i prepared the taxes on.
AHA, that article has a date "January 3, 2021", so I guess still in progress?
But ok, divest their tax prep business... the WAY CK was providing free tax prep was by funding it with the rest of their portfolio, the credit card marketing and such. The tax prep got people into their system (and possibly got their data into their system, I'm not sure how much was opt-in or opt-out).
Divest their tax prep business? Into it's own business? It won't possibly be able to provide the service for free anymore right? They will probably quickly go out of business.
I don't know how the heck anti-trust regulators think this did anything positive. Intuit one way or another succesfully eliminated the competition from free creditkarma tax prep. Gah.
That just makes me wonder what Credit Karma is getting out of the deal.
In several years of using it, they've never emailed me advertising anything, and while they're obviously sharing my info with credit card companies and banks, I haven't gotten any marketing from them either. If you don't care about the recommendations, as I don't, you can use it for your taxes and never think about it the rest of the year.
This would all be in addition to what they knew about your credit score or anything else you input on the other parts of their platform.
But as others pointed out, that part of CK got split off when Intuit bought them.
The DOJ forced them to sell that whole unit if they wanted to be acquired because of the super obvious data mining consolidation
I had to quit turbotax because one year I was a 1099 worker and every year since, it pushes me to go with their "small business edition." Each year it got harder to avoid "upgrading."
Seriously, just do it. Quitting TT is so much easier than quitting anything else.