That hurts, hope it comes to the public.

I’m not going to lie; there is a threshold where just being a complete tribal savage is easier than dealing with the beauracacy. If it becomes too time consuming, expensive, and stressful to do taxes, I will squat in the soon-to-be ruins of business real estate and hunt the local pigeon and duck populations to survive.

So you mainly want to avoid Intuit owned companies and H&R Block. They alone spent millions per year to lobby against easy and free filing for taxpayers.

Then there’s the ACTR (American Coalition Of Taxpayer Rights) who spend $100s of thousands a year lobbying for the same (and are made up by 14 members:

https://www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org/about/

Intuit

H&R Block

Tax Act

OnLine Taxes

Wolters Kluwer

Tax Hawk

Liberty Tax

Drake Software

Jackson Hewitt

also the following financial institutions:

Netspend

Republic Bank

TPG Santa Barbara

pathward

Edit: Started a post in /c/asklemmy to find out alternatives. Tax Act was my go-to company, but they’ve joined the ACTR at some point, so they’re a no-go.

https://lemmy.world/post/8447282

Edit 2: Checking out some older reddit threads on the subject, FreeTaxUSA may be the best option so far. FreeTaxUSA are owned by Tax Hawk which is a member of the ACTR, however of all the ones i’ve checked so far, they are the cheapest (free Federal and $15 state), and at least they’re not one of the top lobbying companies like Intuit(Turbo Tax/Credit Karma tax services), H&R Block, or Jackson Hewitt.

Or not. Just cut out the middle man.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/gT5_8nGWL0w?si=_Wc7SNtZXjvGOb8Y

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.