Review Day: FreeTaxUSA

After too many years of piggybacking off of the family TurboTax purchase, we finally took the plunge and used FreeTaxUSA.com this year. It took the same amount of time as TurboTax and was a pleasant experience.

The base product is free (you just need an email to make an account). You can e-file Federal for free and pay $14.99 for state e-files. It handled our investments just fine. We did W-2s, 1098, 1099-INT, 1099-DIV, 1099-B with the base product.

It can import a PDF of last year's taxes to use as a roadmap. We found that it imported the official Returns just fine but overlooked a few details from Worksheets. However, it didn't cause any errors of omission as a result, it just said "We don't have data from last year" in those places and let us fill it in. Next year it will have everything it needs since our data is now in the system.

What we liked better than TurboTax: Info tooltips are more helpful and clearer. Sometimes it felt like TurboTax's info tooltips were intentionally verbose to reinforce that you NEED TurboTax to figure everything out. I also liked that you can view a PDF of how the returns/worksheets will look as you are filling out a section, so you can see where the values end up and how they affect other values.

What wasn't as good: You cannot import your W-2s or 1099s directly from the companies. (There is a beta feature where you can upload PDFs of these docs, but we just typed in the numbers by hand).

What was the same:: You can go step-by-step through the tax categories or just get the bird's eye view and open the categories that you needed last year. They do bug you to upgrade a lot, which is more reasonable since it's a free product.

Final Grade: B+