There's a large backstory documented by (mostly) propublica, some of it is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americ

There's a large backstory documented by (mostly) propublica, some of it is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... Essentially: * IRS wanted to open tax software business to private companies. * Intuit has a variety of products with similar names and each has a free offering for a specific set of tax payers (e.g. income below some number). IRS + US Gov bought the story. * Intuit caught doing a variety of false advertising, misleading documentation, adversarial website editing, etc. They make it impossibly hard to find which is the free version of whatever you need. So this is a big first step away from the draconian Intuit monopoly. It would be interesting to know what precipitated this change.