TurboTax is 100% free for State and Fed for many people (probably several tens of percent of the country), anyone with a simple tax return. I use it every year to file for free for both. They try and make money by selling you audit protection, trying to get you to put your refund on their debit card, etc.
I'm not seeing how this is much of an argument for them to buy CreditKarma.
The argument for them to buy it is they then get:
- access to all of that credit report information
- access to the savings account customers
- the linked car and driver information
- more free tax customers to try and upsell audit protection and to try and push returns on their debit card to
- mortgage and other loan shopping data from everyone that's used the mortgage comparison
- potentially as much as 13 years of weekly credit data on given individuals
TurboTax was sued for making it impossible to find their legally mandated free filing product. While many people qualified, they tricked most of them into paying for their paid product unnecessarily.
Just this year they were ordered to make that products slightly easier to find, but they can still do most of their tricks to direct people away from it.
Credit Karma is an existential threat because it makes free filing easy to find.
I suspect after this deal completes, the CK free file product will start having all the same dark patterns and TurboTax's free product.
> They try and make money by selling you audit protection, trying to get you to put your refund on their debit card, etc.
This is exactly the problem. They're not nearly 100% free. It's only free if you manage to navigate their byzantine, dark-pattern-ridden series of questions that effectively ask "Do you want to use the results of the last 12 pages you entered and try to save with TurboTax Deluxe or delete that half hour of work?" and confusingly named products like "Guaranteed Free", "Free Edition", "Start for Free" (all not actually free).
TurboTax makes more than a billion dollars every year. Of course they'll want to squash competitors who threaten to harm that cash cow.
This years TT version actually makes it quite hard to get to Deluxe from Free edition if you get there from e.g. IRS site. Basically what happens is when you get to the end, it tells you "Surprise! Your return does not qualify for the free version!" but doesn't offer you any immediate way to upgrade. There's a sequence of clicks which allows to do that (took me about 30 mins to find it) but it's not very trivial and rather hard to discover.
Once you are in the paid versions, the upsell push is relentless. But not in the (actual) free edition, at least that was my experience this year.
I'm not giving them any benefits, I am just describing what I have seen. I have no idea why they did that, I'm just saying that was my experience - since not everybody is going to bother clicking through all tax return forms to see what happens at the end.
I'm not seeing how this is much of an argument for them to buy CreditKarma.
The argument for them to buy it is they then get:
- access to all of that credit report information
- access to the savings account customers
- the linked car and driver information
- more free tax customers to try and upsell audit protection and to try and push returns on their debit card to
- mortgage and other loan shopping data from everyone that's used the mortgage comparison
- potentially as much as 13 years of weekly credit data on given individuals
etc.