Intuit Inc. INTU Moat

Key data

The moat

A plumber with four vans opens QuickBooks because the alternative is a shoebox. Every invoice, reconciled bank line, payroll run and sales-tax filing lands in it, and after three years the file is not software, it is the company's memory. Leaving means re-keying history, retraining whoever does the books, and telling an accountant of two decades to learn something else. That is a switching-costs moat, built from accumulated records and a professional class trained on one system.

TurboTax is a different animal and the distinction is the whole dive. It is a habit attached to an annual dread: the customer returns because last year's data is already loaded. That is brand, thinner than switching costs, and it renews once a year with the customer free to walk.

What it produces is pricing power. QuickBooks Online Accounting revenue grew 23% in fiscal 2026 with higher effective prices named first among the drivers, and online ecosystem revenue per customer rose 14%. Raising price on the system of record while adding customers is a moat being exercised. Gross margin at 81.3% is what that looks like downstream.

Widening or narrowing

The two franchises are moving in opposite directions and the consolidated line hides it.

Consumer units have fallen three seasons running: 40.5 million, 39.9 million, 39.2 million. Revenue rose anyway, up 7% in fiscal 2026, entirely on price and mix. The mix is deliberate: TurboTax Live grew 17%, 47% and 37% across those years and now carries 53% of TurboTax revenue, so more than half the consumer business is assisted filing rather than the do-it-yourself product that built it. Converting cheap filers into expensive ones is good business and a smaller funnel each year.

Small business is widening. Online Ecosystem growth of 20%, 20% and 19% looks flat until Mailchimp comes out, at which point it reads 25% and 23% for the last two years. Intuit is carving Mailchimp into its own segment in fiscal 2027, conceding the acquired product has diluted everything around it by roughly four points.

Profit pool. In consumer tax the pool is shifting from software licences to human expertise, a thinner and harder-to-scale slice Intuit takes because the alternative is losing the filer to a free option. In small business the pool sits in payroll, payments and money movement attached to the accounting file, the fat slice, and the file protects it.

The overrated case. Credit Karma grew 5%, then 32%, then 20%. That is a lending-cycle business reported inside a software company, and a reader who takes the fiscal 2025 acceleration as evidence of platform strength is reading interest rates. Strip it and Consumer Group growth is materially slower than the segment line suggests.

Trajectory: stable.