If you only drive part time
Part-time driving does not need a simpler tracker. It needs a more reliable one.
The reasoning is counterintuitive and it holds up. Someone who drives every day builds a habit. Someone who drives twice a week does not, so manual logging fails more often, not less, and the trips lost are a larger share of a smaller total.
So automatic capture matters more, and earnings sync matters less. Earnings comparison exists to tell you which platform pays better across many shifts. With six shifts a month there is not enough data for that answer to mean anything.
The free option is worse than it looks here. Free tiers are usually trip-capped or manual, and both fail on an irregular schedule: you hit the cap in a busy week, or you forget in a quiet one.
And the price is not the decision. At the second-half 2026 rate of 76 cents a mile, 150 business miles a month is about $1,368 of deduction a year. Any subscription in this category is a fraction of the tax that saves. Is a tracker worth it part time?
What to weight, in order
1. Capture reliability. Does it get the trip without you doing anything, from a cold start, on a day you were not expecting to work. This is the whole decision and it is the hardest thing to evaluate from a feature list. Why apps miss trips.
2. Trip dating. 2026 uses 72.5 cents January to June and 76 cents July to December, so a tool that stores a date per trip is correct and one that totals a year and multiplies is wrong. Ask specifically. The 2026 rate.
3. Battery behaviour on days off. More important part time than full time, because the app is running on your non-working days too unless it is genuinely event-driven. Why trackers drain your battery.
4. Export. You want a file, in a format an accountant or tax software accepts, without a phone call.
5. Price. Last, and by a distance.
What not to weight
Earnings sync, for the reason above.
A route map replay. Attractive, rarely used, and not what substantiates a deduction. What substantiates it is date, miles, destination and purpose. What a log has to contain.
Bookkeeping features, unless you already wanted bookkeeping. A part-time driver with one income stream and a mileage deduction does not need a general ledger. MileTruth vs QuickBooks Solopreneur.
The free-tier trap, specifically
A free tier with a monthly trip cap behaves badly on an irregular schedule. You do 40 trips in one busy week, hit the cap, and the rest of the month is unrecorded. The month you lose is usually your best month, because that is why you hit the cap.
A free manual tracker has the opposite failure: nothing is capped, and nothing is recorded, because you were not in the habit.
Neither failure is visible until year end. MileTruth vs Stride covers what free actually costs in this category, and the pricing table has what each option charges, verified at source.
What we would actually say
If you drive irregularly and want the deduction without thinking about it: prioritise capture reliability and trip dating, and treat everything else as secondary. The full comparison of every major app.
If you drive a handful of times a year: an app may genuinely be more than you need. A note in your phone with date, miles, destination and purpose, kept at the time, is a valid contemporaneous record and costs nothing.
MileTruth is our own product and is in development, not released. It is built for capture reliability and for the second question this category ignores, which is whether the driving actually paid. For a part-time driver, the first of those is the one that matters, and any tracker that gets it right is a reasonable answer.
More in this section
About MileTruth
MileTruth is an iOS app from Baker Ventures LLC that tracks deductible business mileage for gig and delivery drivers and shows true net pay: what is left after mileage, fuel and self-employment tax, not what the platform showed you at acceptance. It is built for people driving several platforms in the same shift, and for anyone who needs a mileage log that would hold up if the IRS asked for it. The app is in development.
Everything on this site is free and needs no account: the mileage deduction calculator, the per-platform pay breakdowns, and the answers, each one linked to the IRS publication or platform document it came from. MileTruth publishes the source for every number, including the 2026 split-year standard mileage rate, because a deduction you cannot substantiate is not a deduction.
Questions and answers
Is a mileage tracker worth it if you drive a few hours a week?
Usually yes, because the deduction on even modest mileage exceeds a year of any app in this category, and because part-time drivers lose a larger proportion of their trips than full-timers do. The subscription is not the variable that decides it.
What matters most in a tracker for part-time driving?
Automatic capture, because part-time driving is irregular and irregular driving is what manual logging loses. A person who drives every day builds a habit; someone who drives twice a week does not, and forgets.
Is a free tracker enough for part-time driving?
Free tiers in this category are usually trip-capped or manual, and both fail in the same way for irregular driving: you hit the cap in a busy week or you forget in a quiet one. A missed month of trips costs more than the annual price of anything here.
Do I need earnings sync if I only do this occasionally?
Less than a full-timer does. Earnings sync exists to compare platforms across many shifts, and with a handful of shifts a month there is not enough data for that comparison to mean much.
What about battery drain on a part-time schedule?
It matters more, because the app is running on days you are not working unless it is genuinely event-driven. That is worth checking specifically before committing to one.
Does part-time driving change the tax treatment?
No. The mileage rules are the same regardless of hours. What changes is that a smaller total makes accurate capture proportionally more valuable, because each lost trip is a larger share of the deduction.
MileTruth. “If you only drive part time.” Baker Ventures LLC, September 7, 2026. https://miletruth.bakerventuresstudio.com/compare/best-mileage-tracker-if-you-drive-part-time/