TurboTax instead said it would offer free filing options for lower-income taxpayers, but it also made those free options difficult to find and promoted its own “free” TurboTax services that ultimately forced many taxpayers to upgrade to its paid services. Last year, a ProPublica investigation revealed TurboTax’s decades-long quest to stop the Internal Revenue Service from creating its own free tax software. Put differently, that amounts to many millions of people who are not paying for TurboTax.Īnother selling point for Credit Karma for many of its taxpayer users is (well, was) that it isn’t TurboTax, which has been dogged by allegations of ethical shadiness. Credit Karma’s tax preparation software helped the company more than double its users from about 45 million at the end of 2015 to over 100 million worldwide at the beginning of 2020. Instead of money, you give Credit Karma your financial data and endure targeted credit card and loan advertisements. The big selling point for Credit Karma is that - in stark contrast to TurboTax - its services are free. Credit Karma began as a free credit monitoring service in 2007, but it recently expanded to offer savings accounts as well as tax preparation and filing software, making Credit Karma an up-and-coming competitor to Intuit’s popular TurboTax software. On Monday afternoon, the company announced that it was purchasing Credit Karma for $7.1 billion in cash and stock. Financial software giant Intuit just bought itself another online personal finance startup - and the data of that startup’s tens of millions of customers.