Juno

Dave Haase built this for his own practice first, and Golden State Accounting ran more than 500 returns through it in 2025 before it was sold widely. The product is organised as four modules. Preparer reads the source documents, covering more than a hundred types including handwritten organizers and phone photographs of statements, and pushes the extracted data straight into Drake, Lacerte, ProConnect or CCH Axcess, with ProSeries announced. Binder is the workpaper set the team marks up and signs off in. Reviewer compares the return fields back to the source documents and flags year-over-year movement. Advisor works the finished return for planning points.

The pricing is the clearest in this category and worth understanding, because the unit is what decides the bill. Juno charges one flat rate per return, and every return costs the same whether it is a single-state 1040 or a multi-state 1065 with a stack of K-1s. The rate falls as annual volume rises, users scale with volume at two per hundred returns, and above 2,500 returns the price becomes a negotiation. Every feature is included at every level, so there is no tier to upgrade into. A firm running 200 returns can price this exactly from the website slider, which is unusual here, and five free preparations are available without a card.

The verification question has an unusually blunt answer: there is no human queue. Juno states that no one on its side offers manual review and that only the firm's own team touches the data. That is a genuine security argument, and it comes with a matching posture of SOC 2, end-to-end encryption, automatic SSN redaction on upload, randomised client IDs before anything reaches an AI provider, US-only residency, and zero-retention agreements with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. It is also the trade-off. Where GruntWorx or Magnetic hand back work a US-based person has already checked, Juno hands back an extraction and the firm supplies the second pair of eyes. Firms that bought this class of tool to buy capacity rather than speed should price that difference in.

The other gaps are UltraTax and ProSystem fx, both absent from the write-back list, which rules the product out for a large share of firms on the Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer stacks. The company is small and its published footprint is thin: no founding year, no headcount, no customer count, and the strongest usage evidence is the founder's own firm. Delivery is not part of the product either, so a firm still needs SafeSend or similar for assembly, 8879 signature and K-1 distribution.

Against Soraban, which is the closest comparison, Juno is more transparent on price and reaches ProConnect today, while Soraban reaches UltraTax and covers delivery as well as prep. Against Magnetic, Juno is software the firm operates and Magnetic is a service with credentialed reviewers behind it, which is a different purchase entirely.

Strong option is right. The per-return pricing, the four-module structure and the security detail are all more developed than an early product, but the install base is undocumented, UltraTax is missing, and the absence of any vendor-side review means the tool saves keystrokes rather than staff.