I have been using TurboTax online since about the time it was first made available.
This year (and the last few years, though it has gotten worse now), I am very dissatisfied by the amount of aggressive sales/marketing during filing my taxes with turbotax, all of the upsells and cross sells are very disturbing and intrusive, exacerbating an already stressful experience making matters much worse.
Turbotax used to be a lot of fun and made things easier, now I am so upset over the aggressive sales I will consider doing my taxes elsewhere from now on. There are plenty of competitors in this space who offer the same online services.
I would suggest that Intuit please allow customers to opt out of all of this upsell marketing and trick questions attempting to make people add more services that aren't required to file. Last year I ended up purchasing identity protection and some other add-ons that I had no intention to buy, because I was tricked into purchasing them thinking it was a federal tax requirement (it wasn't!). Then, It was difficult to get myself removed from these services later on since some are tied to 3rd party companies which I found also sell my personal information to other parties without my consent.
In example, the way the upsells are presented and worded makes it look like it is not an add-on service, for example, the 'skip' buttons are light and practically hidden, while the purchase buttons are big and bold, I guess in an attempt to entice people or perhaps intentionally obfuscate the option to decline. As a technically savvy person I was able to discern the difference and opt-out this year, though this UI design and practice seems very unethical behavior to me, enough to make me not want to do more business to support this company's questionable business practices.
Then, at the end, I was given two upsells when attempting to confirm direct deposit, which I have always done through my bank, and not a 3rd party service tied to an advance cash scam. I'm sorry to use the strong language here, but it's no different from going to one of those awful check cashing shops who take advantage of people living paycheck to paycheck, it just seems poor taste to associate with such services while trying to file one's taxes and get your return honestly in the usual way.
I am sure there are many others who feel the same way, and how this design got past security and compliance teams at Intuit, just seems to reveal a lack of a moral compass across the company. I hope this changes, and whoever was in charge of this nonsense considers a career and personal life changes needed to abhor it as much as I do.
