Is MileIQ free? Yes, for 40 drives a month

#The short answer

MileIQ is free for 40 drives a month. After that the app stops logging until the calendar month turns over or you subscribe. The paid plan, called Unlimited, is listed at $11.66 a month billed annually or $13.99 a month billed monthly.

Those are the numbers on MileIQ's own pricing page, read on 21 September 2026. The App Store listing puts it more strangely. Under the feature list it says:

Unlimited mileage tracking with 40 free drives every month

Both halves of that sentence cannot be true at once. The pricing page is the one to believe: free is 40 drives, and 40 drives is a cap.

#What 40 drives actually buys you

A drive is one trip, not one day. Leaving the house, visiting three clients and coming home is four drives, not one. That arithmetic is what catches people out.

How you work	Drives in a month	Does the free tier hold?
Two client visits a week	About 16	Yes, comfortably
A trades business with two jobs a day, four days a week	About 48	No. You run out in the last week
Estate agent, six viewings a week	About 52	No
Delivery driving, three shifts a week	Hundreds	No. You run out on the first day

So the free tier fits the person who drives for business occasionally. It does not fit the person whose deduction is large enough to be worth tracking, which is the same person the cap is designed to convert.

#Why a cap is worse than a price

This is the part worth being precise about, because it is a tax problem rather than a pricing complaint.

When the cap bites on the 23rd, you do not lose a feature. You lose the last eight days of the month from your record. And the IRS does not treat a record with a gap in it the way it treats a complete one. Publication 463 is direct about timing:

You should record the elements of an expense or of a business use at or near the time of the expense or use and support it with sufficient documentary evidence. A timely kept record has more value than a statement prepared later when there is generally a lack of accurate recall.

Filling those eight days in from memory in April is precisely the statement prepared later. The publication does allow reconstruction, but it reserves it for records lost because of reasons beyond your control, and it names fire, flood and other casualties. A subscription prompt is not a casualty.

There is a legitimate route through an incomplete month, and it is narrower than most people assume: your own written statement plus other supporting evidence sufficient to establish the trips. That is real work, per trip, for every day the app declined to record. It is covered in full in what an auditor rejects in a mileage log.

The money is the smaller half of the argument. Eight days of a busy month might be 300 business miles. At the second half 2026 rate of 76 cents, that is $228 of deduction that never existed on paper. Do it twice a year and the cap has cost you more than the subscription it was selling.

#What to check before you trust any free tier

Caps are advertised. The things that actually decide whether a free tier is usable tend not to be.

• Is the cap on tracking or on the export? A cap on tracking puts a gap in the evidence. A cap on the export leaves the record complete and charges you to get it out, which is recoverable. The first is a tax problem; the second is a purchase decision.
• What happens to the drives you already logged if you stop paying? Ask before you need the answer. A year of data locked behind a lapsed subscription in March is the worst version of this.
• Can you get a full export, in a plain format, without a subscription? CSV opens anywhere in ten years. A proprietary report inside an app does not.
• Where do the drives live? A mileage tracker knows every address you visited and at what time. Read the privacy label on the App Store listing rather than the marketing page.
• Does the app know this year's rate? Two rates apply in 2026, and plenty of apps still carry one.

#What MileIQ costs now, and what it cost before

Price rises are normal. The size and the frequency of these ones are what people notice at renewal.

Date the pricing page was captured	Annual plan	Monthly plan	Free tier
21 May 2024	$4.99 a month billed annually	$5.99	40 drives a month
17 December 2025	$7.50 a month billed annually	$8.99	40 drives a month
21 September 2026	$11.66 a month billed annually	$13.99	40 drives a month

The first two rows come from Internet Archive captures of the same page, linked in the sources below. The annual plan has gone from $4.99 to $11.66 a month in about two and a half years, a rise of roughly 134 percent. The free tier has not moved once in that time. Forty drives in 2024, forty drives today.

#The free tiers, side by side

Everything in this table was read on 21 September 2026 from each company's own pricing page or App Store listing. Free tiers change without announcement, so check the date before you trust the row.

App	What the free plan allows	Cheapest paid plan
MileIQ	40 drives a month	$11.66 a month billed annually
Everlance	Manual recording plus 30 automatic trips a month	Not listed on the App Store page
Driversnote	Automatic tracking, reporting of up to 15 trips	$11 a month
Hurdlr	Automatic mileage tracking is a Premium feature	$9.99 a month or $99.99 a year
Stride	Free, with no trip cap stated in its listing	No paid tier listed
DriveSnap	Unlimited tracking and unlimited history	Free in full at version 1.0

One detail worth carrying away. Hurdlr's App Store description, today, tells you to "deduct 57.5 cents for every mile you drive". That was the rate in 2020. The correct figures for 2026 are 72.5 cents to 30 June and 76 cents from 1 July, which is on the 2026 rate page with the IRS source. Marketing copy goes stale; your return cannot.

#If you already hit the cap this month

1. Write down today's odometer, with the date. A photo of the dashboard is fine. You need a bookend for total miles whatever you do next.
2. Reconstruct the missing days trip by trip, not in a lump. Calendar entries, job sheets, invoices, delivery history, bank card traces at fuel stops. Each one pins a date and a destination.
3. Write the purpose in your own words for each trip. That is the element no app and no bank statement can supply, and the one examiners look at first.
4. Do not round. A column of clean numbers is the single clearest sign of an estimate, and estimates are not deductible.
5. Move to something that does not stop. Any tracker without a monthly cap, ours included, removes the failure mode entirely.

#Where DriveSnap sits, said plainly

We build DriveSnap, so read this section with that in mind.

DriveSnap does not cap tracking, and it is not going to. The reasoning is the argument above: capping the log is capping the evidence, and evidence with a hole in it fails at exactly the moment it is needed. Recording drives stays free and uncapped whatever the app charges for later. Nothing is uploaded either, because there is no server to upload to, which matters more than usual for an app that knows every address you visited.

The honest part: DriveSnap is not on the App Store yet. If you need something installed this afternoon, one of the other free tiers above will serve you better today, and the comparison is on the DriveSnap and MileIQ comparison page. When it ships, tracking will still be free and still be uncapped.

Whichever you pick, the thing that survives an examination is the record, not the app. The free log template has the columns the IRS expects, and it never stops working on the 23rd.