Short answer: For a small or medium firm that wants private AI on client documents, Faradex, which publishes this guide, starts at $120 a month. Blue J is a tax research tool you can buy online today. Larger firms and tax departments should look at Bloomberg Tax and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Tax, two tax research platforms with AI built in.
AI for small and medium tax firms
Your team already uses AI on client work. A small firm needs a tool with a price it can see before it calls anyone, and a plain answer on what happens to client returns once they go in. The IRS now tells practitioners to use "only secure, enterprise-approved AI." The full guide is Best AI for small and medium firms.
- Who it's for
- Small and medium tax and accounting firms that want private AI for confidential client documents.
- What it does
- Gives your firm its own private AI Workspace on dedicated infrastructure. A team of AI agents researches, drafts, analyzes and cross-checks work on your client documents. It is not tax software: it has no tax research library, tax forms or e-filing, so use it alongside your tax research tool.
- Price as published
- From $120 a month. The faradex.ai homepage says: "Starting at $120 per month with no user minimum."
- How you buy it
- From faradex.ai, starting with a free trial. Firms of more than 20 people can ask Faradex to size a plan.
- What happens to client data
- Your files, chats and Workspace database are held in memory only. Nothing is saved to a drive, there are no backups, and it is all gone when you reset. Faradex staff have no access. Faradex currently uses Opus via AWS Bedrock, where zero-data-retention mode means Amazon does not store your prompts or responses, and Anthropic has no access to them. Everything stays in the U.S. Faradex says: "We are SOC 2 compliant. Specifics can be found at https://faradex.ai/security."
Source: faradex.ai · faradex.ai/security · Checked November 10, 2026
Claim $150 in private AI usage credit- Who it's for
- Sole practitioners on the Individual plan, and firms with several tax professionals on the Team plan.
- What it does
- AI tax research and drafting, with what Blue J calls "Full US federal and SALT tax coverage" and "Unlimited questions, drafting, and file uploads."
- Price as published
- Individual plan: $1,498 a year per user. Team plan: price on request.
- How you buy it
- Online, with a 7-day free trial and no credit card required. For the Team plan, contact Blue J.
- What happens to client data
- Blue J says customer data is not used to train AI models. It uses models from OpenAI and Google, has signed agreements that bar both from training on Blue J data, and has opted out of their abuse monitoring. Uploaded files older than 24 hours are deleted every day; other data is removed on request. Data is stored and processed in the U.S., in Amazon Web Services' Northern Virginia region.
Source: bluej.com/pricing · bluej.com/security · Checked November 10, 2026
Visit siteEnterprise tax AI platforms
Big tax research platforms now come with AI. CoCounsel Tax answers from Thomson Reuters' Checkpoint content, and Bloomberg Tax said in March 2025 that its AI comes at no extra charge for platform subscribers. Most plans start with a demo, though firms with up to 10 users can buy CoCounsel's Tax Essentials plan online. The full guide is Enterprise tax AI.
- Who it's for
- Firms and tax departments that subscribe to the Bloomberg Tax research platform.
- What it does
- Adds Bloomberg Tax Answers and an AI Assistant to the Bloomberg Tax research platform.
- Price as published
- Bloomberg said in March 2025 that its AI features come "at no additional charge" with the platform. We found no published platform price.
- How you buy it
- Request a demo.
- What happens to client data
- We found no published AI data policy, retention period or data location. Will Matthews, Bloomberg Tax's director of product management, quoted in an article on Bloomberg Tax's own site, said: "We do not send information, whether it's your query prompts or now your document uploads outside of our system ... And we never train any LLM with any user information."
Source: Bloomberg Tax AI announcement · Bloomberg Tax research · Will Matthews quote · Checked November 10, 2026
Visit site- Who it's for
- Tax and accounting firms and tax departments that want AI research built on Thomson Reuters' Checkpoint content. The Tax Essentials plan is "designed for mid-market and small CPA tax and accounting firms."
- What it does
- AI built for tax work that gives "citation-backed answers grounded in trusted Checkpoint content." Plans cover tax research, and audit and accounting.
- Price as published
- Tax Essentials: $1,300 a year for one user. CoCounsel Tax Research and CoCounsel Audit & Accounting: price on request.
- How you buy it
- Firms with up to 10 users can buy Tax Essentials online. The other plans start with a demo request.
- What happens to client data
- Thomson Reuters says your content is not used to train CoCounsel's AI features, every call to an outside AI model uses zero retention, and prompts are processed and hosted in the U.S. Your conversations, documents and workspaces are kept for the life of the account unless you delete them.
Source: CoCounsel Tax · CoCounsel Tax plans · CoCounsel Tax pricing · CoCounsel security · Checked November 10, 2026
Visit siteHow this list is put together
Tools are grouped by the size of firm they fit and how they are sold. Faradex is listed first because it is our product; the enterprise platforms are listed alphabetically. Every card says who the tool is for, what it does, its published price, how you buy it and what happens to client data. Each fact comes from the tool's own pages, or for Faradex from Faradex's own material, and each card links to its sources and shows the date we checked them.
We list a tool only where its own pages confirm what it does and how to buy it. We left out tools whose pages we could not read, or whose AI data terms we could not find at all. Where a listed tool does not publish a price or a data policy, its card says so. General-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot is covered on the small-firm page, because none of it is built for tax work.
Why client data handling matters
Federal law makes it a crime for a preparer to knowingly or recklessly disclose a client's return information, or use it for anything other than preparing the return (26 U.S.C. 7216). The IRS's June 2026 guidance on AI warns of "unauthorized disclosure of sensitive taxpayer information, especially when data is uploaded to unsecured or public systems." So before client data goes into any AI tool, find out who keeps it, for how long and where. The full explainer is Taxpayer data and AI.
What to ask an AI tax tool vendor
- Do you or your AI model provider train any model on our client data?
- How long do you keep our prompts and files, and can we delete them?
- Where is our data stored and processed? Under the Section 7216 rules, some disclosures to staff outside the United States need the client's consent (Treas. Reg. 301.7216-2(c)).
- Will you put your safeguards in the contract? The FTC Safeguards Rule requires firms to do this with service providers (16 CFR 314.4(f)).
- Is the price published, and can we buy without a sales call?
- Is the tool built for tax work, or is it general-purpose AI?