Grove

Six numbered steps run from intake to filing, and Grove covers all of them. It reads the prior-year return and produces a brief of income sources, dependents, entities and schedule-by-schedule comparisons. From that it builds a per-client document checklist rather than a generic template, invites the client by magic link with no portal setup, and replaces the long intake PDF with an adaptive chat that asks only what applies. Uploaded documents are renamed to the firm's convention, split, deduplicated, bookmarked into return order and annotated with tick marks that travel through to the final PDF. The return is then drafted from those workpapers with year-over-year anomaly detection, a missed-deduction sweep and line-level tracing back to the source page. Delivery is a recorded video walkthrough, a branded summary, Form 8879 signed with knowledge-based identity verification, and automatic IRS submission within an hour of signature.

Pricing is the most transparent in this batch. The collection steps are free, the first 25 returns a season are free, delivery is listed at $10 per return, and there are no platform fees, per-seat fees, storage fees or e-signature fees. Off-season cost is zero. At 200 returns that arithmetic is very attractive. At 1,500 the per-return model runs against the firm and the pricing page moves to a quote, so a larger practice needs a number before committing.

The structural issue is that Grove drafts and files the return itself. No tax program is named anywhere on the site, and the demo shows Grove's own 1040 draft, its own e-file submission and its own confirmation and archive. That makes it a replacement for the compliance engine rather than a layer on top of one, which is a much bigger decision than the price suggests. A firm running Drake or UltraTax with years of carryforwards, depreciation schedules and state history has to work out what happens to those, and nothing published addresses conversion. Coverage is the 1040 only, with no entity returns and no K-1 distribution. There is no security page, no SOC 2 claim, and no statement of where data is stored; encryption is described as bank-grade, which is not a control. Nothing says what share of extracted values goes to a human check or who performs it. The named reference firms, NEPA Tax Associates, RDG Tax, Hidden Cove Financial and Tejas Star Tax, are small practices with no published results attached.

Against SafeSend, which does delivery and 8879 e-signature at scale with years of firm use behind it, Grove is cheaper and broader but unproven. Against Soraban or StanfordTax, which focus on the collection half and leave preparation alone, Grove asks the firm to move more of its process. Filed and Black Ore take the opposite architectural bet by writing into the engine the firm already uses.

One-to-watch is right. The founders shipped professional tax software before this, at Intuit and IBM Watson, and the workflow is the most coherently designed in this group, with KBA e-signature actually included rather than deferred to a partner. But the copyright reads 2026, the backing is an accelerator, there is no security attestation, and asking a firm to hand its filing to a product with one season of history and four named clients is a large request at any price.