If you are in India, tomorrow is the last day for filing your income tax returns. For nearly a decade, I have done the same thing every year. At the beginning of the year, I tell myself I’ll finish it nice and early. Then, I think about the income tax portal and develop a stomach ache. So I procrastinate for weeks until I work myself up to a state of panic. Finally, at the last minute, I do my annual ritual. I visit the Cleartax website, and thanks to its exceptional user-experience—a mixture of positive reinforcement, soothing microcopy, and amazing communication—I file my taxes. I love Cleartax. They just know how to make a painful process feel joyous. Every year, I finish filing my taxes on Cleartax and I tell myself, I can’t believe this website is free. Well. Not anymore. Fintech company Clear (erstwhile Cleartax) has started charging for its income tax return (ITR) self-filing feature beginning [the] current assessment year. The company, which started in 2011 with self-ITR filing as the first product offering, had been providing the facility free of cost. “This incredible product has been available free of cost to all our users for 10+ years. In order to continue supporting our users with this amazing product, starting May 2022, we are charging our users a nominal fee that would help us sustainably process data of millions of Indians all while ensuring 0% downtime," read a note on Clear’s website. Fintech firm Clear starts charging for ITR filing after 10 years of free service | Mint To be clear (heh!), I'm not outraged about this. If anything, I’m surprised it took them this long to charge for what many consider a pretty solid service. If you look at tax filing, Clear is the market leader in India, at least among individuals. Every year, like clockwork, ‘Neha from Cleartax’ lands up in our email inboxes. And millions of Indians like me fall for her charms, and use Clear’s sleek, sexy website to file our taxes. Many websites offer a self-serve tax-filing service. But Cleartax is the biggest among all of them (with the exception of the government’s income tax portal itself, of course). So when India’s largest private tax-filing website asks all of its users to pay up to use their website, after a decade of doing it for free, it feels pretty significant. The crazy part is that nobody else seems to have noticed this. In fact, that Livemint article I shared above is the only news report I could find about this development.
And nobody seems to be wondering why Clear is suddenly doing this. What did it finally see after a decade?
I think Clear has discovered the three limits that a lot of internet and software companies are seeing in India. I have written about this several times before, but more than any other company, the clearest evidence about what is happening is coming from… Clear. Let’s dive in.