Mileager

Mileager is an automatic mileage tracker for people who drive for work and would rather not think about it until tax time or the end of the month. It records your drives in the background, lets you sort business from personal in one tap, and exports clean monthly reports as PDF or CSV. There is no subscription, no account, and no company server holding your location history.

Why it exists

I am a freelance photographer. I drive to shoots, to clients, to airports, across cities and states. For years my mileage records was a guess reconstructed from a calendar and a sinking feeling every April. Every work mile I forgot was money I handed back to the IRS for no reason.

The apps that promised to fix this wanted a monthly subscription, an account, and a copy of my location history on their servers. That is a strange trade for a glove-box notebook. So I built the automatic tool that I wanted: it watches for driving, keeps the records on my phone, and gets out of the way. I use it and want other freelancers to use it too.

What it does

Mileager captures drives automatically once you grant location and motion access, so you are not starting and stopping a timer at every stop. You review trips when it suits you and mark each one business, personal, or not a drive. For the trips it misses, you add them by hand and it looks up the route. It tracks purposes, notes, tolls, parking, your own mileage rate, and odometer checkpoints, then turns all of it into a report you can hand to an accountant or attach to an invoice.

What it does not do

It does not track you for anyone but you. There are no third-party analytics, no advertising, and no app-hosted server. Your trips live on your device, with optional private iCloud sync through your own Apple Account (I’ll add a MacOS app in the future). App Lock keeps the whole thing behind Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode. I tried to program it to keep your travel data stored in a safe place on your phone, the only info that has to be out of that safe place is the last place you parked your car.

It also does not pretend to be your accountant. Mileager keeps the records and does the arithmetic, but GPS misses things and software is fallible, so you review your trips before you rely on a report. It is a recordkeeping tool, not tax advice, and it cannot guarantee any tax, audit, or reimbursement outcome. For anything you file, talk to a qualified professional.

Who makes it

Mileager is made by David Degner, a photographer based in Boston. It is a one-person project, which is why it is free of subscriptions and free of the data harvesting that pays for most “free” apps. If you have an idea or hit a problem, write to me at David@DavidDegner.com. I read every message.