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.

That hurts, hope it comes to the public.

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.