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. If you only want free options and their exact limits, see our comparison of free mileage tracker apps.

At a glance

Competitor plans checked against each vendor's own pages on 3 October 2026 (linked in the sources below). Plans and prices change, and some vendors' pages disagree with each other — check each provider's site before deciding. TripTally prices are US Google Play prices.

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 a receipt scanner in Pro), and calculates quarterly federal and state self-employment tax estimates. Free keeps your full history, CSV export and import, and receipt photos; Pro adds the receipt scanner, recurring expenses, PDF reports and Trends.

TripTally is Android only. Free to start, with 14 days of Pro and no card required; after that, Pro is optional.

Everlance

Free tier, with paid Starter and Professional plans. Everlance is a well-established mileage and expense tracker aimed at self-employed workers and small teams. The free plan includes 30 automatically detected trips a month plus unlimited trips you start yourself, and receipt uploads. Paid plans make automatic detection unlimited; bank and card integration is on Professional. On 3 October 2026 Everlance's pricing page showed two different sets of prices, so we don't quote one here.

Its records are cloud-based, 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, or $11.66/month billed annually, with a 40-drive 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 plan covers 40 drives a month, with the subscription unlocking unlimited. Its individual pricing page focuses on mileage rather than broader income and expense tracking.

Stride

Free. Stride offers GPS mileage tracking, expense logging and a deduction finder at no cost, funded through its health insurance marketplace rather than a subscription, and says it will stay free. Recording isn't automatic: you start each drive yourself, so it suits a driver who's happy to build that habit.

Because the business model is insurance-based rather than subscription-based, the app surfaces insurance offers alongside the tracking features.

Gridwise

Free Basic plan; Plus from $9/month billed annually ($14.99 billed monthly). 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: on the free plan you start and stop trips yourself, and automatic tracking is a Plus feature.

TripLog

Free tier; Premium $59.99/year. TripLog is the most configurable of the group. Its free plan advertises unlimited automatic GPS tracking, though free reports cover only the last 7 days. It supports several tracking triggers, including a Bluetooth beacon and a plug-in hardware device, and Premium adds unlimited reporting, the web app and cloud backup.

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 tapping start: Stride or Gridwise's Basic plan.
• You want automatic tracking free and can live with short reports: TripLog.
• 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. Billed annually at the prices above, MileIQ runs about $140 a year (about $168 if you pay monthly), TripLog Premium $59.99 and Gridwise Plus about $108, against $29.99 for TripTally Pro or nothing at all on the free tiers. Check Everlance's current price on its own site. 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

Most apps in this list offer automatic tracking on at least one plan, 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 detection can start late and can record trips where you were a passenger.
• Bluetooth trigger. Tracking starts when your phone connects to your car's stereo and stops when it disconnects. Well suited to 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

GPS tracking uses battery, by an amount that depends on the phone, the app and its settings, so test it on a normal shift. Permissions differ too. Some apps ask for "Allow all the time"; others, including TripTally, record with Maps or a driver app in front by running with a visible notification instead. Follow your app's own setup steps, then check on your first few trips that it keeps recording when another app is on screen.

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. An app can capture the dates and miles; you still supply the purpose, keep personal trips out and record the annual total. 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

Free: unlimited trips, full history, CSV export and import, and receipt photos. Optional Pro: auto-start, receipt scanning, recurring expenses, PDF reports and Trends. No account required; records stay on your phone. Android only.

Sources

1. Stride: Stride blog: Is Stride really free? · Stride Help: Can Stride start tracking automatically? · Stride on the App Store
2. TripTally: TripTally on Google Play
3. Gridwise: Gridwise Plus
4. Everlance: Everlance pricing
5. TripLog: TripLog pricing · TripLog Help: TripLog Basic
6. MileIQ: MileIQ pricing · MileIQ: About us
7. IRS Publication 463: commuting and the standard mileage rate (ch. 4), recordkeeping (ch. 5)

Vendor pages checked 3 October 2026. Where a vendor's own pages disagreed, the article says so rather than quoting one figure. Some vendor help pages could not be loaded on that date; the Stride help article is listed as the vendor's own description of how recording starts.

Related: 7 best free mileage tracker apps · Common tax deductions for US gig drivers · How to track mileage for taxes