A MileIQ alternative for people who file Schedule C

What MileIQ is good at

MileIQ does one job and does it well: it logs your drives in the background and lets you swipe each one left for personal or right for business. You don't have to remember to start a trip. The phone notices you moved and records the route, then you sort the list later. For someone whose tax life is mostly about miles, that swipe-to-classify flow is genuinely the easiest way to keep a log, and it's the main reason MileIQ has the reputation it has.

We are not going to pretend that isn't valuable. If automatic mileage capture is the only thing you need, MileIQ is a reasonable pick and we'll say so plainly.

• Background drive detection: trips record without you tapping start
• Swipe-to-classify: one gesture sorts business from personal
• Focused product: mileage is the whole job, so the app stays simple

Where MileIQ stops, and where a Schedule C return keeps going

Here's the honest gap. Miles are one line of your tax return. If you file Schedule C as a freelancer, consultant, contractor, or single-member LLC, your deductions also include software, phone, supplies, home office, and the rest of Part II. Your income side includes hours worked and invoices sent. MileIQ doesn't track any of that, so at tax time you're still pulling expenses out of a bank statement, hours out of a spreadsheet, and invoices out of a separate app.

Self Employment Toolkit was built around the whole return instead of one line of it. The mileage you log feeds Part IV vehicle information. Expenses get tagged to Schedule C lines as you enter them. Time entries roll into invoices, and paid invoices become income. At the end of the year you export one bundle in Schedule C order: PDF and CSV. The point isn't to add features for the sake of it. The point is that one tool covers the form you actually file.

• Mileage at the IRS rate (72.5 cents per mile in 2026) plus expenses, time, and invoices in one place
• Expense categories mapped to Schedule C Part II and Part V
• Time entries turn into invoice line items, and paid invoices post to income
• Year-end export bundles everything in Schedule C order, PDF and CSV

The price comparison, miles for miles

MileIQ is $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year for mileage tracking. Self Employment Toolkit is $6 a month or $48 a year for mileage plus time, expenses, invoices, and the year-end Schedule C bundle.

So the annual plan is the clean comparison: $48 a year for the toolkit covers four tracking jobs and a tax-prep export, and it still costs less than MileIQ's $59.99 a year for mileage alone. If you were going to pair MileIQ with a separate time tracker or invoicing app, you'd be stacking two subscriptions to get what one $48 plan does.

The honest tradeoff: we're GPS-manual today

We won't bury this. MileIQ records drives automatically in the background. Self Employment Toolkit does not do that yet. Today you start and end a trip in the app, or enter the distance, and GPS handles the route. Background auto-detection on iOS is on our roadmap, but it isn't shipped, and we'd rather tell you that than let you find out after you pay.

So the decision is real, not rigged. If hands-off automatic capture is the single thing you care about, MileIQ has the edge there right now. If you'd trade a couple of taps per trip for a tool that also handles your time, expenses, invoices, and the Schedule C export, for less per year, that's the trade the toolkit is built around.

Who built it, and who it's for

Self Employment Toolkit is built by Spencer Wood, a solopreneur who files Schedule C himself. He started it after years of paying for QuickBooks features he never used and fighting bugs he didn't cause. Every feature has to pass one test before it ships: would he use it in his own business?

It's built for one kind of person: a sole proprietor or single-member LLC with no employees, no payroll, and no inventory. If that's you, the toolkit is shaped around exactly the return you file. If you have a payroll to run or a warehouse to count, you've outgrown us, and we'll say that too.

Common questions