TurboTax-Quality US-Expat Tax Filing Software With Country-Pair Reconciliation for EU and Canada Filings
A high-signal Ask HN comment by deanmoriarty named the willingness-to-pay number directly: $1k–$2k per year for software that handles American expats with American investments living in specific European countries, including the local-country filing and the income from the US investments declared abroad. The comment was followed by an emotionally vivid story showing that even a competent CPA missed a 6-figure AMT credit via Form 8801 — making the case that 'just hire an accountant' is not actually a safe answer. r/expats threads echo the same pain in the US-Canada direction, with the thread OP describing four years of workarounds to even buy TurboTax Desktop from Canada. expatfile.tax exists for the US-only side but doesn't handle the foreign-side filing or its interaction with the US filing. The market is small but the pricing power is exceptional.
Pick one country pair and go ten levels deep. Don't try to be 'expatfile.tax for everywhere' — that's how MyExpatTaxes ended up shallow. The HN commenter's revealed-preference price of $1–2k/year means a few thousand annual seats per country pair makes a real business. The Form 8801 case study in the source thread is the marketing — show the calculator that catches what their CPA missed and the conversion happens by itself. Expect 12+ months to first paying user because the legal + e-file integration on the foreign side is a slog.
landscape (5 existing solutions)
Existing software solves the US-side filing in isolation. CPAs charge a lot and miss things. Nobody has built the integrated US-plus-country-X product the HN commenter is willing to pay $1–2k a year for. The viable v1 picks one country pair (US-Germany, US-Netherlands, or US-Canada are the largest pools) and goes deep — Form 8833 treaty positions, FX reconciliation, AMT credit tracking via Form 8801, and the local-country e-file integration. That's a lot of regulatory surface area, but the willingness to pay is in line with serious B2B SaaS pricing for a B2C product.