MileShield vs the platform estimate.
The mileage number DoorDash, Uber, and Instacart hand you at year-end is a floor, not the full deduction. Here is what it counts, what it misses, and whether it is enough for taxes.
Most drivers' actual competitor is not another app. It is the free mileage figure the platform already gives them, and the spreadsheet or shoebox next to it. It is worth taking that option seriously, because for some drivers it is genuinely good enough, and for many others it quietly costs them money.
The short version: the platform estimate is real and usable, but it is calculated narrowly, it is not a contemporaneous log by itself, and it leaves out a category of deductible miles the IRS lets you claim. Whether that matters depends on how you drive.
What the platform number actually counts.
Platforms generally measure miles only while you have an active trip: from accepting or starting an order to completing it. That is an honest number for what it is, but it is a floor. Everything between orders, when you have no active trip but are still working, is invisible to it.
That gap is the deadhead miles: repositioning to a busy zone, driving back from a far delivery, fuel stops mid-shift. For most drivers that is 15 to 30 percent more deductible mileage than the platform reports. We break the math down in the deadhead miles guide.
The multi-app problem.
Each platform only knows about its own miles. If you run Uber and DoorDash in the same shift, you get two separate estimates that do not know about each other, and neither counts the miles you drove between a DoorDash drop-off and your next Uber ping. Stitching two partial estimates together by hand is error-prone, and it is exactly the kind of reconstruction the IRS treats skeptically.
Is the estimate enough for an audit?
The IRS asks for a contemporaneous log: records kept at the time you drove, with dates, distances, and business purpose. A single year-end total from a platform is a summary, not a trip-by-trip log. You are allowed to file using your own records if they show more business miles than the platform reported, but only if you can actually substantiate them.
That is the real difference. MileShield keeps a dated, trip-by-trip record with the GPS path behind each trip, which is the substantiation the platform summary does not give you.
When the platform estimate is genuinely enough.
Being honest, because that is the point of these pages: if you drive one platform only, in a dense area with little repositioning, part-time, and you are comfortable that the estimate roughly matches your odometer, the platform figure may be close enough that a tracker would not change much. Not every driver needs an app.
When it is costing you money.
If you multi-app, chase surges across a wide area, deliver in spread-out suburbs, or drive enough that 20 percent of your miles is a meaningful number, the platform estimate is probably leaving real deductions unclaimed, and it is not giving you the audit trail to defend the miles it does count. That is the gap MileShield is built to close, and you can see how on the features page.