This was supposed to be in reply to Squeaks response to rickhamilton620 regarding Thrive. I've pasted it into the correct window above.

We are always working to make sure that our service is providing you with the tools and resources that you need to improve your financial life. If you think of anything we could do better, please let us know by emailing support@justthrive.com!

Thanks so much!
Elisa@Thrive

We are always working to make sure that our service is providing you with the tools and resources that you need to improve your financial life. If you think of anything we could do better, please let us know by emailing support@justthrive.com!

Thanks so much!
Elisa@Thrive

Keep up the good work.

@Hooray4Zoidberg: Please try:
[www.taxact.com]
$70 my eye! This one has never given me a bit of trouble for 7 years, and for state AND fed costs $20 a year, if you decide to purchase. (free fed e-file included)

You can also download the software for federal for free and use it fully to get your printed federal forms before deciding to purchase the rest. (or just print out the fed and mail it in) IF you can fill out your state form directly from the federal forms, and mail everything in, it will come out costing you nothing.

There's also software for more complex returns, like for businesses, that are still a lot less than $70.

Download federal for free just to test it out, use info from last year's returns to answer the questions, and see what you think. (NOTE: The totals may not be exactly the same if you use LAST years numbers, and THIS years tax forms because of tax code changes.) Be aware the free version does have a lot of "please upgrade" nag screens.

I don't think this has anything to do with Inuit. This is how Mint has always made its money.

THIS WAS NOT INTUIT. Why was this story posted with the start "It didn't take long for Intuit to start ruining a great product. They've begun upselling Mint.com customers to two "free" credit report sites that are anything but." when that was nor correct.

Who fact checks before putting things up? Ya, I see the "UPDATE" but the damage was done already.

Personally, I feel the credit reporting companies should not be allowed to run freecreditreport.com. They should be shut down.

@NICU:

In other words, a competitor that provides the service for free and rejects all other avenues for generating revenue?

Do what you will, but Intuit made the founder of mint.com the head of their personal finance products division including overseeing all of Quicken.

They realized that they had a crappy product and their doing something about it, that's what I see.

But from what I've heard it is usually good enough.

@scoosdad: Theree's a credit score form in mint. You can enter in a score range and it'll give back suggested stuff.

@dreamcatcher2:

Agreed,

Most people are whiners so they look for any action/event to criticize. Mint has been advertising financial services to help pay its bills for years so making a big deal out one more offer that on the site is nothing short of "retarded".

Just keep in mind that if they didn't offer these services & ads they wouldn't have been able to provide the service. COMMON SENSE here people.

Why is everybody all "Oh no Mint sucks, time to leave" about this? They've been ad-supported for as long as I've been using it (1+ years).

Yeah -- people are just looking for ways to hate on Mint since Intuit bought the,, but this has been there for ages. They make money by referring people to different credit products, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they back freecreditreport.com.

@dreamcatcher2: Exactly, it's not a new thing. I tried Quicken Online once it went free but couldn't get used to the way it did balances-it assumed i had a set salary with that real balance thing.

Has anyone found an alternative to mint that works well? I always like to try new things and competing services. :)

A bug in the MA state tax portion kept me and many others from e-filing. Even their context sensitive help on the problem page, which pulls questions from their user forums, kept pulling up unsolved questions from users with the same issue.

I used their email customer service system which takes 48 hours to respond. They finally sent me a response to my question 2 days later asking me another question in their response. However there was no way to reply to the email to answer their question. The email originated from a donotreply address and there was no additional contact info provided in the email, no phone number, no reply address, nothing.

I eventually solved the problem on my own with a few suggestions from the forums but it basically ended up with me having to submit a property ownership form with a fake address instructing the IRS to ignore this form. Not exactly comforting for a product that cost me over $70 to use. I should note this happened in late January too, it wasn't a last minute tax thing so I'd hate to be someone on April 10th waiting 2 days for an email response.

@aloria: Exactly, it's funny how people scream OMG it's Intuit's fault...Mint's gone ROGUE!!!!!

It's been around for a long time now, i've just ignored it.

I then found myself frustrated there wasn't actually have a mechanism to tell it, "Yes, I've actually paid that bill that I asked you to remind me of" or even "Perhaps when I ask you to remind me of a bill, maybe you should actually, y'know, REMIND me of the thing until I acknowledge that I've paid it, you binary piece of..."

In other news, everybody in the country is entitled to get their own credit reports once per year from each of the three credit reporting bureaus: Trans Union, Experian, and Equifax. To get it, just to go [annualcreditreport.com.] That's the only truly free (as in beer) site that won't try to upsell additional features to you.

Sadly, though, it's all a profit deal at some level -- those credit agencies WILL try to upsell you once you get to their sites. Just look for the "No thanks..." links to continue.

it sucks when something great is bought up by something not as great. should be the other way around...

@NeverLetMeDown: That being said, "free"creditreport.com will only give an approximation as well.

@FatLynn:

They'll give you a pretty decent approximation, but it's not truly a FICO score. You can only get that from Fair Isaac.

My bigger worry, and why I've never signed up for Mint, is what happens to the data? Now that Intuit owns it, does the privacy policy change? If I had signed up, would all my bank information and/or the statistics that go along with it now belong to them?

I hope there's a piece of driftwood still left for me to grab.