Comment by plorkyeran

I used to use TurboTax but then compare the pdf it generated line-by-line to the pdf from the previous year, and caught things I'd missed fairly often. One year though I was having trouble finding where in the UI the field I needed to set was, and concluded that the whole process was stupid. I then switched to just filling out the forms directly using my previous year's as a guide, and found that it just didn't really take any longer. This year I spent about an hour on my taxes with W2 income, RSUs (with an incorrect cost basis), ESPP trades, dividend/interest income from four different brokerages, and some stock trades to report.

I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.