Multi-apping mileage and earnings

The tax half, which is simple

Publication 463 wants, per trip, the date, the mileage, the destination or route, and the business purpose, recorded at or near the time. Nothing in that asks which app produced the trip.

So: one log, all business miles, dated. Include the unpaid ones — driving toward demand, repositioning between offers, returning from a delivery zone — because they are generally deductible business miles and for delivery work they are commonly 30 to 50 percent of the total. Unpaid miles are still deductible.

And in 2026, dated matters more than usual: 72.5 cents per mile through June 30, 76 cents from July 1, determined by when you drove. The two-rate explainer.

The profitability half, which is where the money is

This is the analysis almost nobody runs, and it is the one that changes behaviour.

Attribute paid miles to the platform whose offer you were fulfilling. Unambiguous.

Treat idle and repositioning miles as overhead, and spread them across platforms in proportion to the paid miles each produced. Not perfect, and it is the honest approximation.

Then compute, per platform:

net $/hr = ( gross from that platform
             - ( attributed miles x your cost per mile ) )
           / hours you were primarily working it

Your cost per mile is the input everything turns on, and it is personal — fuel or charge, tyres, servicing, insurance, and honest depreciation, divided by total miles. A national average cannot produce this number, because the whole point is that the average is wrong for you in one direction or the other. How to build your cost per mile.

What the analysis usually shows

Three patterns come up often enough to be worth looking for in your own numbers.

The highest gross is frequently not the highest net. A platform that pays well per offer but sends you further can lose to one that pays less over shorter distances. Gross hourly hides this completely.

Long-distance offers are where the loss lives. A $9 order eleven miles away is a 22-mile round trip once you count getting back to where the work is. At 41 cents a mile that is $9.02 of vehicle cost against $9.00 of revenue. Multi-apping tends to surface more of these, because you see more offers.

Multi-apping usually raises gross per hour and sometimes lowers net. Less idle time is real. More miles is also real. Which wins is an empirical question about your market, and it can differ by day of the week.

The practical setup

One mileage tracker, running always. Not one per platform. You want a single complete record of miles driven, and running several trackers produces several disagreeing totals and a temptation to pick the friendliest at tax time.

A weekly note per platform: gross earnings, hours primarily worked, and roughly what share of your driving it accounted for. Five minutes.

A monthly odometer check. Photograph the odometer, compare against the tracker's total including personal driving. Multi-apping is the pattern that loses the most miles to manual-start trackers, because nobody presses start to reposition. How to measure capture rate.

Export every platform's history annually, before you lose account access. It is corroboration for the log and the source data for the analysis.

Why MileTruth exists at this intersection

The category splits: mileage apps total miles and do not know what you earned; gig trackers sync earnings but do not build a personal cost-per-mile model, so their net figures rest on a generic assumption.

MileTruth is built for the join — capture every mile reliably, price those miles against your vehicle, and report net dollars per hour, so the platform comparison above is a screen rather than a spreadsheet. It is in development and not released. Every mileage app compared, honestly.

Questions and answers