Get your taxes done using TurboTax

ok, will start with the good news.  i opened a case through "contact us" and after 10 min on hold and wading through prompts i got an actual person.  after the normal this and that they shared my screen and saw that they were in fact not extending me the early bird pricing.  they didn't know why or how to fix it, so I agreed to a 20% discount code which knocked me down to only paying $2 more than advertised.  i'm not complaining about that per se, because after wasting a couple of hours on this already i was happy to escape finally.  See the pic below ...

My bigger point is that no way was this just a technical coincidence.  Imagine all the people they probably do this to that don't have the time or inclination to argue over $30.  Non-transparent pricing (misleading, confusing, however you chose to describe it), difficult customer service, and all the rest is just more unethical business from big tech.  I have used this company for 15 plus years now, and they have raised their rates every year since 2015 at least.  Their software is great, everything outside of that not so much.

Sincere thanks to everyone who assisted me on this.  Hopefully my case is anomalous.