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Announcementby Gair

Why I Built MileClear

I built MileClear because I couldn't find a mileage tracker that did what I actually needed.

A couple of years back, I was doing some delivery driving on the side - nothing serious, a few Deliveroo and Amazon Flex shifts a week. I knew I could claim mileage back against my tax bill (45p per mile, first 10,000 miles - it adds up faster than you'd think), but keeping a proper log was a nightmare. I tried the popular apps. Most of them were clearly designed for American users: they talked about "IRS rates" and "Schedule C", the UI looked like it hadn't been touched since 2018, and they wanted £8–12 a month for basic export functionality. For someone doing part-time gig work, that felt completely wrong.

The UK gig worker gap

What struck me was how specifically UK this problem is. Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Amazon Flex, Stuart, DPD - we have a huge population of self-employed drivers who are leaving real money on the table because they don't track their mileage properly. And HMRC is pretty generous about it: you don't need receipts, you don't need to justify anything. You just need a log of your business trips with dates, start and end points, and distances.

That's a solved problem, technically. GPS can do all of it automatically. But none of the existing apps were thinking about the UK gig worker specifically. There was no concept of "platforms" - you couldn't tag a trip as an Uber job versus a personal run to the shops. There was no shift model that matched how gig work actually happens (you clock on, do several jobs, clock off - that's a shift). And the pricing was just wrong for the market.

What I wanted to build

MileClear started as a notes file. My rough spec was:

  • Free trip tracking - no artificial limits on the core feature
  • Platform tags - Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon Flex, etc., so you can see which platforms are worth your time
  • Shift model - clock on, do your jobs, clock off
  • HMRC-native - UK tax year (6 April boundary), pence not dollars, 45p/25p rates baked in
  • Exports behind a paywall, but a cheap one - £4.99/month felt right
  • Offline first - your GPS data shouldn't need an internet connection

The gamification came later, and honestly it's one of my favourite parts of the app now. Streaks, achievements, personal records - it sounds silly for a tax tool, but it actually works. Tracking mileage is one of those habits that's easy to forget about until it's too late (hello, January scramble). Having a streak to protect keeps you honest.

The technical reality of building this solo

Building a production iOS app solo is humbling. Background GPS tracking alone has about fifteen different failure modes across different iPhone models and iOS versions. Auto-trip detection - where the app figures out you're driving without you tapping anything - took months to get right. I'm still tuning it.

I made a deliberate choice to keep the stack boring: React Native with Expo, Fastify API, MySQL, no fancy infrastructure. Self-hosted on a cPanel server. The whole thing costs less than a coffee a month to run. That matters when you're bootstrapping something and you don't know if it's going to work.

What's next

MileClear is live on the App Store now, in early access. The core loop - track trips, see your HMRC deduction, export when you need to - works well. I'm adding an annual plan, improving the auto-trip detection, and listening carefully to what beta testers actually want before I build anything else.

If you're a UK driver of any kind - gig worker, sole trader, employee who uses their personal car for work - and you're not tracking your mileage, you're leaving money with HMRC that's legally yours. MileClear is free to try. Give it a go.