Best mileage tracker apps for gig drivers

If you drive for Uber, DoorDash, Instacart or any other platform, your mileage deduction is almost certainly the largest write-off on your return. A tracker app exists to make sure none of it goes unrecorded. Here's how six of the common options actually differ.

Mileage apps look similar at a glance — they all log trips and export a report. The real differences come down to three things: what it costs, whether tracking starts on its own, and where your driving history ends up. This comparison sticks to those.

At a glance

Pricing as published by each provider in August 2026. Plans and features change — check each provider's site before deciding.

TripTally

Free tier, or Pro at $4.99/month / $29.99/year with a 14-day trial. TripTally is built around two ideas: tracking should be automatic, and your driving history should stay on your phone.

There's no account and no sign-up. Trips, earnings and expenses are stored in local storage on the device itself rather than synced to a server, and backups go to your own Google Drive folder or a file you export. That has a genuine trade-off worth stating plainly: with no server copy, losing the phone without a backup means losing the data. The app pushes you to turn on backups during setup for exactly that reason.

Tracking runs on GPS in the background with auto-stop detection when you park. Pro adds Bluetooth auto-start — pair your car once and trips begin the moment you connect. A floating bubble sits over Uber, Maps or whatever else you have open so you can start and stop without switching apps, which is the feature most likely to matter on a busy shift.

Beyond mileage it tracks earnings across 15+ platforms, logs expenses with receipt photos, and calculates quarterly federal and state self-employment tax estimates. Free keeps your most recent 30 days of history; Pro unlocks all of it plus PDF reports.

Everlance

$8.99/month, with a free tier. Everlance is a well-established mileage and expense tracker aimed at self-employed workers and small teams. Automatic GPS trip detection, expense and receipt capture, and tax reporting are all included, and the paid plan lifts the free tier's monthly trip cap.

It syncs to the cloud with an account, which means your history is available across devices and through a web dashboard — genuinely useful if you switch phones or want to review the year on a laptop. Everlance also offers business plans for companies reimbursing employee mileage, so it scales beyond the solo driver.

MileIQ

$13.99/month, with a limited free tier. MileIQ is one of the longest-running dedicated mileage apps and is known for a simple core interaction: it records drives automatically in the background, then you swipe each one left or right to classify it as personal or business.

That swipe-to-classify model is the app's signature and works well if you want a clean split between personal and business driving without thinking about starting a timer. The free tier covers a set number of drives per month, with the subscription unlocking unlimited. It focuses on mileage specifically rather than broader income and expense tracking.

Stride

Free. Stride offers mileage tracking, expense logging and tax estimates at no cost, funded through referrals to health insurance and other services rather than a subscription. For a driver who wants automatic tracking without paying anything, it's a straightforward option.

It requires an account and stores data in the cloud. Because the business model is referral-based rather than subscription-based, the app surfaces recommendations for insurance and related products alongside the tracking features.

Gridwise

Free, with a paid tier. Gridwise is built specifically for rideshare and delivery drivers and goes wider than mileage. Alongside trip tracking it aggregates earnings across platforms and adds gig-specific extras — airport demand data, local event calendars and earnings analytics designed to help you decide where and when to drive.

If your question is "which platform and which hours are actually paying me best," that market-data angle is the differentiator. Mileage tracking is one part of a broader driver analytics product.

TripLog

Free tier, with paid plans. TripLog is the most configurable of the group. It supports several automatic tracking triggers — Bluetooth, a plug-in power source, or a dedicated hardware device — and offers detailed IRS-oriented reporting.

It also serves business fleets with mileage reimbursement, approval workflows and team management. For a solo driver that's more machinery than you need, but if you want fine control over exactly how and when tracking starts, TripLog has the most levers.

How to choose

Rather than ranking these, it's more useful to match one to what you care about:

• You want it free and don't mind a cloud account: Stride or Gridwise.
• You want your data to stay on your phone with no sign-up: TripTally.
• You want the simplest possible classify-each-drive workflow: MileIQ.
• You want cloud sync and a web dashboard: Everlance.
• You want maximum control over tracking triggers, or run a fleet: TripLog.
• You want market data on where to drive: Gridwise.

The cost math

Subscription differences add up over a year. At the prices above, MileIQ runs about $168/year and Everlance about $108/year, against $29.99 for TripTally Pro annually or nothing at all on the free tiers. Whether that gap matters depends on how much you drive — at the 2026 standard rate a single well-documented 200-mile week is worth far more in deductions than any of these apps cost. The tracker that pays for itself is whichever one you'll actually keep using.

What "automatic" actually means

Every app in this list advertises automatic tracking, but they trigger differently, and the trigger determines how many miles you actually capture.

• Motion detection. The app watches your phone's accelerometer and GPS and starts recording when it decides you're driving. Zero effort, but it can miss the first minute of a trip and occasionally records you as a passenger in someone else's car.
• Bluetooth trigger. Tracking starts when your phone connects to your car's stereo and stops when it disconnects. The most reliable option for a dedicated work vehicle, because the trigger is the physical act of getting in.
• Power trigger. Tracking starts when the phone is plugged into car power. Simple and dependable if you always charge while driving.
• Manual start. You tap to begin. Most accurate about intent — nothing personal sneaks in — but it depends on you remembering.

The practical difference over a year is large. A driver who forgets to start tracking twice a shift, five shifts a week, at four miles a trip, loses about 2,000 miles annually — roughly $1,500 in deductions at 2026 rates. That gap is usually worth more than the price difference between any two apps on this page.

Battery and permissions

Any app doing background GPS needs "allow all the time" location permission, and any app with that permission uses battery — typically around 2% an hour while actively tracking. If you grant only "while using the app," tracking stops the moment you switch to Maps or the platform app, which is most of your driving time. This catches a lot of new users who then conclude the tracker is broken.

What matters more than the app

Whichever you pick, the IRS cares about the record, not the software. A compliant mileage log needs the date, the business purpose, and the miles driven for each trip, plus your vehicle's total annual mileage. Every app here can produce that. The failure mode isn't picking the wrong app — it's not tracking consistently, then trying to reconstruct a year from memory in April.

Two habits matter more than your choice of software: photograph your odometer on 1 January and 31 December so you can establish business-use percentage, and export your log at the end of every month while you can still remember whether it looks right.

Try TripTally free

Automatic GPS mileage, quarterly tax estimates and receipt capture — no account, and your data stays on your phone. Free tier plus 14 days of Pro, no card required.

Related: Gig worker tax deductions: the complete list · How to track mileage for taxes