ItsDeductible vs DeductiBee: what we kept, changed, and cannot replace

ItsDeductible was, by any reasonable measure, a good product. About 20,000 iPhone ratings averaging 4.8 stars is not something you get by accident, and almost none of the anger around its shutdown was aimed at the software. People were furious with the company and fond of the tool.

So the design brief for DeductiBee was not "do it better." It was: keep what those 20,000 people liked, fix the handful of things they complained about for a decade, and change the one structural thing that made October 2025 possible. Here is that comparison, including the place where the old product was genuinely ahead of us and will stay ahead.

At a glance

The full row-by-row version, with the notes, lives on the comparison page. What follows is the part a table cannot carry.

What we kept

The shape of the thing, mostly, because it was right. A donation is an organization plus a date. You add items to it from a category tree you can browse or search, each item has a condition and a quantity, and a running total sits at the top of the screen so you can watch a bag turn into a number. That flow is twenty years old and it works.

We kept the taxonomy's shape too: four levels from category to sub-category to item to variant, designer apparel split out from regular apparel because the value gap is enormous, children's clothing split by age band because sizes and values differ sharply, and an "other" leaf everywhere so nothing is unloggable. That structure came from studying how the old product organized things, not from copying its numbers, which is a distinction we take seriously and explain below.

And we kept the year-round habit, which is the actual product. Not a calculator you meet in April, a log you keep in March.

What we changed, and why

A tier for things that were never used

"There is no category for brand new" was a standing complaint for years. The old tiers were High and Medium (a Low tier existed but was disabled after the 2006 law change), and they were value tiers blending brand, style, age, and condition rather than condition alone.

DeductiBee uses Like new, Good, and Fair: plain condition language, which is both how the IRS talks about donated goods and how people actually describe a sweater. There is deliberately no Poor tier, because Publication 526 states that clothing and household items generally are not deductible unless they are in good used condition or better.

Values you can change

Catalog values in the old product were fixed. If you thought the number was wrong, the documented workaround was to re-enter the item as a custom item and value it yourself, which quietly stripped it of whatever backing the catalog gave it.

In DeductiBee you can override any suggested value, and the override is flagged in every export. That flag is the point. An adjusted value that announces itself is defensible; one that hides among the catalog values is not.

Photos, at last

The old product never supported attaching images, in any era. Its own help said so. Which is strange, given that the whole promise was having something to show if a deduction was ever questioned, and a photograph of the actual bag next to the actual receipt is the most direct evidence a donor can produce. DeductiBee attaches photos to items and to the drop-off receipt.

Entering a bag as a bag

The most common complaint from the heaviest users was that entry was tedious: one item at a time, forever. DeductiBee lets you add a bag at once, picking a condition tier and setting a quantity, then move on. Same records at the end, a fraction of the taps.

Deleting an organization without losing its history

In the old product, deleting a charity deleted the charity and every donation attached to it. In DeductiBee, deleting an organization never silently deletes its donations. Small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that costs someone a year of records.

The change that actually matters

Everything above is product design. The structural difference is where the records live.

ItsDeductible kept your donation history on Intuit's servers behind an Intuit account, which is why the shutdown had a deadline attached and why anyone who missed it believed years of records had vanished. DeductiBee keeps your records on your iPhone. If you turn on sync it goes through your own private iCloud database, which means Apple's storage rather than ours. There is no DeductiBee account, and there is no DeductiBee server holding your donations.

The consequences are worth being blunt about, in both directions. We cannot switch your data off, cannot lock it behind a lapsed subscription, and raw CSV export is free on every tier permanently, including after a subscription ends. We also cannot restore your history if you delete the app with sync switched off, because we genuinely do not have it. That trade is deliberate and it is the whole reason this app is built the way it is.

What we cannot replace

The valuation data, and we would rather say it clearly than have you discover it.

Intuit licensed a daily feed of closed eBay auction prices and blended it with thrift-store sales data. That is a real data advantage, it cost real money, and a one-person app cannot buy it. Two consequences follow. Our catalog is smaller: 1,172 selectable goods at launch, 784 of them carrying a cited value range, against the 1,700-plus the old product advertised in its final year. And our ranges may read as more conservative than the numbers you remember.

We are not going to inflate ranges to close that gap. What we do instead is show the source next to every range, derived from published thrift-store valuation guides and the fair market value methodology in Publication 561, refreshed as a dated annual edition. Publication 561 defines fair market value as the price a willing buyer would pay a willing seller, with neither required to act and both reasonably informed, and it points at what used items actually sell for in consignment and thrift shops as the indication of value for used clothing and household goods.

You can check that claim before installing anything: the calculator and the per-category value guide run in a browser and show the source on every range.

Who should use what

DeductiBee is a good fit if you donate throughout the year, in bags, and want the record to survive any company. It is a poor fit if you are on Android, if you donate stock (not in v1), or if you want a charity lookup built in.

If you file with TurboTax Online and donate once a year, the valuation tool now built into its donation screens may be all you need, and it is free. If you want a like-for-like hosted successor on any device, other products are aimed squarely at that, and we compare them in where ItsDeductible refugees actually landed. If you are considering going manual, what you actually lose with a spreadsheet is the honest version of that trade.

Whatever you choose, get your old data out of Intuit first. It is still there, and the request takes five minutes.