Best Tax Deduction Tracking Apps of September 2026: 6 Compared on Price and Free Tiers

Disclosure: the Keeper links on this page are affiliate links. If you start a Keeper free trial through one, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Keeper is the only product here that pays us anything, and the other five links earn us nothing — which is why the ranking below does not put Keeper first. See our affiliate disclosure. Editorial placement is decided on merit and is not for sale.

By Lennit Herrera, founder and editor  ·  Last updated September 24, 2026

The verdict: For most self-employed filers the best value is QuickBooks Solopreneur’s free plan at $0 if you drive fewer than five business trips a month, and Keeper at $199 a year if you want write-off scanning and the actual tax return in one place. That gap is the whole decision: mileage-and-receipt trackers start at nothing, while apps that also file your return start near $120 a year and climb.

The number that moved this year is not a subscription price. The IRS raised the business standard mileage rate mid-year — 72.5 cents a mile for January 1 through June 30, 2026, then 76 cents from July 1 — so 2026 is a two-rate year, and an app applying one rate to all twelve months will get your deduction wrong. That is the most useful thing to ask any mileage tracker right now, and it has its own section below.

Prices, plan limits, free-tier caps and trial lengths were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on September 22, 2026 and re-checked on September 24, 2026. Mileage rates, substantiation rules, the self-employment tax rate and estimated-tax thresholds were read from IRS.gov the same day and are linked to the exact page. Software pricing moves — check the vendor’s page before you buy.

This article is information and education, not financial or tax advice. None of these companies is a bank, broker or adviser. Whether a particular expense is deductible for you is a question for a qualified tax professional or the IRS’s own guidance.

On this page

• The short list
• Comparison table
• How we picked
• 1. QuickBooks Solopreneur — best free plan
• 2. Keeper — best for finding write-offs and filing together
• 3. Everlance — best mileage and expenses in one app
• 4. Stride — best genuinely free forever
• 5. MileIQ — best dedicated mileage tracker
• 6. Hurdlr — best real-time tax estimates
• Which one is right for you
• The 2026 mileage rate split, and why it matters
• What the IRS actually requires you to keep
• What the free tiers really cost you
• Tracking deductions is only half the job
• What didn’t make the list, and why
• When you don’t need one of these at all
• Frequently asked questions
• Bottom line

The short list

• QuickBooks Solopreneur — best free plan, if five mileage trips a month is enough
• Keeper — best for finding write-offs and filing the return in one place
• Everlance — best combination of automatic mileage and automatic expenses
• Stride — best genuinely free option, with no trip cap
• MileIQ — best dedicated mileage tracker, nothing else in the way
• Hurdlr — best for watching your tax bill move as income arrives

Comparison table

All figures read from each vendor’s own pricing page on September 22, 2026, and re-checked on September 24, 2026. Where a promotion applies, the table shows the regular price.
^† Everlance serves two different price sets from the same page, and which one you see appears to vary. We were shown the cheaper set on September 22 and the dearer set on September 24, so both are given as a range. Check the figure on your own screen before subscribing — see the Everlance section.

How we picked

We compared twelve apps marketed to self-employed filers for tracking deductible expenses, and kept the six above. We do not test tax or accounting software, and we do not file returns through these products. Every price, free-tier cap, trial length and plan limit below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on September 22, 2026, and every tax rule is linked to the IRS page it comes from. Where a vendor does not publish a price, we say so rather than repeating a figure from somewhere else.

Four things decided the ranking:

• What the free tier actually allows. Nearly every app here advertises a free plan. The useful question is where it stops — five trips a month and forty trips a month are not the same product.
• Whether the price is published at all. An app that makes you start a signup flow to find out what it costs is marked down for it, and we name the one that does.
• What it produces at tax time. A mileage log, a categorised expense summary, and a filed return are three very different finish lines at three very different prices.
• What it can’t do. Every block below has a populated “Watch out for” — including the one product here that pays us a commission.

1. QuickBooks Solopreneur: best free plan

• Starting price: $0 (Free plan); Lite $20 a month, discounted to $10 a month for the first 3 months
• Free tier: Yes — 1 user, 2 invoices a month, 2 receipt uploads a month, 5 mileage trips a month, 1 contractor
• Platforms: Web and mobile app
• Notable limit: The free plan’s five-trips-a-month mileage cap; filing is a separate Expert Assisted add-on

Why QuickBooks Solopreneur? Intuit is the only company here giving away a permanent free tier that covers all three jobs at once — mileage, receipts and invoices — rather than just one. That matters because most self-employed people do not have a mileage problem or a receipt problem; they have a scattered-records problem, and one app holding all three beats a better app holding one. The catch is the size of the allowance. Five automatic mileage trips a month is roughly one client visit a week, so the free plan fits a consultant, therapist or designer who drives occasionally, and fails immediately for anyone who drives for a living. If that is you, Lite at $20 a month lifts the caps on invoices, receipts and mileage together.

What we like

• A genuinely permanent free plan with no credit card required, not a trial that converts.
• Mileage, receipts and invoicing in one place, so there is one export at tax time rather than three.
• Expert Assisted tax help is powered by TurboTax — the same company, so the handoff does not cross a vendor boundary.
• Published pricing that states the post-promotion price next to the promotional one.

Watch out for

• The five-trip monthly cap is the whole story of the free plan. Two receipt uploads a month is similarly tight — one restaurant meal and one parking garage and you are done.
• The 50%-off-for-3-months offer means the price doubles in month four, from $10 to $20 a month. Budget $240 a year, not $120.
• Filing is not included at any Solopreneur tier. Expert Assisted is an additional purchase, so compare the all-in figure against Keeper’s or Everlance’s bundled price, not the headline subscription.

Best for: the occasional driver who wants mileage, receipts and invoices in one app for $0.
Skip it if: you drive more than a handful of business trips a month — the free caps will not survive week two.

See QuickBooks Solopreneur pricing →

2. Keeper: best for finding write-offs and filing together

• Starting price: $199 a year (Standard); Premium $399 a year; Business $1,199 a year
• Free tier: No — a 14-day free trial, after which an annual subscription is required to submit a return
• Platforms: Web and mobile app; connects up to 10 bank and card accounts
• Notable limit: Annual billing only, and audit protection sits on Premium, not Standard

Why Keeper? Keeper is the only product here that does both halves of the job under one price: it scans linked bank and card accounts through the year looking for business write-offs, then files the federal and state return with a tax professional reviewing and signing it. At $199 for Standard, that bundle is priced sensibly against buying a tracker, tax software and some human help separately. The design assumption is worth understanding before you pay: Keeper is built for people whose business and personal spending run through the same accounts, which is most freelancers and almost every side-hustler. If your business spending already lives in a dedicated business account, the scanning solves a problem you do not have, and a cheaper tracker plus a cheap filing option wins on cost.

What we like

• Standard and Premium both include federal e-file plus state e-file for up to two states, with the return reviewed and signed by a tax professional — not a chatbot.
• Connecting up to 10 financial institutions covers the realistic number of cards and accounts a freelancer uses.
• The 14-day trial is long enough to let the scanner run over your real transaction history before you decide.
• One annual price rather than a subscription that grows with add-ons.

Watch out for

• It is not a free app, and the trial auto-converts. Keeper’s own site says the trial is free for 14 days but that submitting a return to the IRS and your state requires the paid annual subscription. Set a reminder for day 13.
• Audit protection is a Premium feature at $399 rather than $199 — and Keeper’s own pages have not been consistent about this, so read the current plan grid before assuming Standard includes it.
• The jump from Standard to Premium is $200 and is triggered by ordinary situations: three or more states, a K-1, a rental property, or foreign income.

Best for: a 1099 contractor or freelancer with mixed personal and business accounts who wants write-offs found and the return filed in one place.
Skip it if: you have a single W-2, take the standard deduction, and only need to file.

Try Keeper free for 14 days → (then $199 a year for Standard unless you cancel)

Read our full Keeper review →

3. Everlance: best mileage and expenses in one app

• Starting price: $0 (Basic); Starter $89.99 a year or $10.99 a month; Professional $119.99 a year or $19.99 a month — but Everlance runs two price sets and you may see a cheaper one (Starter $69.99 a year or $8.99 a month; Professional $99.99 a year, annual only). See the note below.
• Free tier: Yes — Basic gives 30 automatically detected trips a month, plus unlimited manual start-and-stop trips
• Platforms: Mobile app plus a web dashboard
• Notable limit: Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial and the card is charged when it ends

Why Everlance? Everlance sits between the pure mileage trackers and the full tax products, and at $99.99–$119.99 a year the Professional plan is the cheapest way here to get automatic mileage, automatic expense tracking and a filed 1099 return in one subscription. The free Basic tier is also more honest than most: 30 auto-detected trips a month is six times QuickBooks’ free allowance, and the unlimited manual start-and-stop makes the cap a convenience limit rather than a hard wall — you can still log every trip, you just press the button. For a rideshare or delivery driver that is the difference between a free app being usable and being decorative.

What we like

• Professional bundles all-inclusive 1099 tax filing — federal and all 50 states — into a $99.99–$119.99 annual price.
• 30 auto-detected trips a month free is the most generous automatic allowance among the apps here that also handle expenses.
• Monthly billing exists on Starter at $8.99–$10.99, so no annual commitment is forced on the entry plan.
• Professional includes a stated $1 million audit defence, where most competitors offer nothing of the kind at any price.

Watch out for

• Everlance shows two different price sets, so check what your own screen says before you subscribe. On 24 September 2026 the pricing page served us Starter $89.99 a year / $10.99 a month and Professional $119.99 a year / $19.99 a month. Two days earlier, the same page served the cheaper set: Starter $69.99 a year / $8.99 a month and Professional $99.99 a year with no monthly option. Both sets are present in the page’s own code, and the FAQ text changes to match whichever one you are shown. We could not find any rule for who gets which. Nothing here is a discount code or a promotion you can ask for — it is simply the price you are quoted, so read the figure on your own screen and treat every price in this article as a range.
• The 7-day trial converts automatically. Everlance’s own FAQ states the card is charged at the end of it — $69.99–$89.99 or $99.99–$119.99 annually, depending on the set you are shown. Seven days is short; diarise it.
• Automatic expense tracking and the deduction finder are Professional-only. Starter, at $69.99–$89.99, is a mileage plan with manual expenses, which is not what most people assume they are buying.
• Paying monthly can cost far more, when it is offered at all. On the higher price set, Professional is $119.99 paid annually but $239.88 at $19.99 a month — exactly double. On the cheaper set there is no monthly Professional plan at all, so the annual commitment is the only way in.

Best for: drivers who also have real business expenses and want filing included without reaching $199.
Skip it if: you barely drive — you would be paying for the mileage engine that is most of the product.

See Everlance pricing →

4. Stride: best genuinely free forever

• Starting price: $0, with no paid tier at all
• Free tier: The whole app — mileage tracking, expense tracking and receipt uploads, with no trip cap
• Platforms: Mobile app (iOS and Android)
• Notable limit: It does not file your return, and the business model is health-insurance commissions

Why Stride? Stride is the only app here with no paid tier to upsell you to, which changes what “free” means. Everywhere else the free plan is a funnel with a cap tuned to make you upgrade; Stride’s tax tools are free because Stride earns commissions when members buy health insurance through it. That is a real trade and you should know about it, but it is a different trade from the usual one, and for a gig worker with no budget it produces an unusually clean outcome: automatic mileage tracking with no monthly trip limit, receipt uploads, expense categorisation by job type, and expense reports you can hand to an accountant or upload to tax software. For someone driving for two or three delivery platforms, that covers the actual need.

What we like

• No trip cap and no upgrade prompt, because there is nothing to upgrade to.
• Expense categorisation by job type, which suits people working several gig platforms at once.
• Produces expense reports designed to go straight to a preparer or into tax software.
• Nothing to cancel, so no auto-renewal trap — the failure mode that catches people on three other apps here.

Watch out for

• You are being marketed health insurance. Stride is upfront that insurance commissions fund the free tools. If you do not want insurance offers, that is the cost of the app.
• It does not file anything. Stride gets you to a clean set of records and stops; filing is a separate purchase elsewhere.
• No bank-account scanning. Expenses you do not enter or photograph are expenses Stride never sees, unlike Keeper’s or QuickBooks’ linked-account approach.

Best for: gig and delivery drivers who need a real mileage log at zero cost and already have a preparer.
Skip it if: you want deductions found for you automatically out of your bank transactions.

See Stride →

5. MileIQ: best dedicated mileage tracker

• Starting price: $0 (Free); Unlimited $11.66 a month billed annually, or $13.99 a month billed monthly
• Free tier: Yes — 40 free drives every month
• Platforms: Mobile app plus web reporting
• Notable limit: Mileage only — no receipts, no expenses, no filing

Why MileIQ? MileIQ does one thing, which is both the argument for it and against it. It runs in the background, records drives automatically, and lets you classify each one business or personal with a swipe; the auto-generated reports are built to stand up as a mileage log. If your deduction is overwhelmingly mileage — and for a lot of self-employed people it is the largest single line on the return — then a specialist that never asks you to think about invoices or receipts is defensible. The free tier’s 40 drives a month is the most generous automatic allowance of any app here, and 40 drives is genuinely enough for a part-time driver or someone with a few client visits a week.

What we like

• 40 free drives a month, automatically detected — no manual start-and-stop needed to stay inside the cap.
• Swipe-to-classify is the least tedious way to keep a log that has to be contemporaneous.
• Auto-generated reports are the product’s actual output, not an afterthought bolted onto a bookkeeping tool.
• Simple published pricing with monthly and annual figures shown side by side.

Watch out for

• It is mileage and nothing else. No receipt capture, no expense categorisation, no filing — you will need a second tool.
• The annual price is a real commitment: $11.66 a month billed annually is $139.92 up front, more than Everlance Professional’s $99.99–$119.99 for a much narrower product.
• Paying monthly costs $167.88 a year at $13.99 a month, so the flexible option is the expensive one.

Best for: people whose deduction is mostly miles and who handle expenses elsewhere.
Skip it if: you want one app for the whole picture — at this price, Everlance or QuickBooks does more.

See MileIQ pricing →

6. Hurdlr: best real-time tax estimates

• Starting price: Free app; Hurdlr Premium listed on the App Store at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year
• Free tier: Yes — unlimited mileage (semi-automatic), plus expense and income tracking
• Platforms: iOS (requires iOS 17.0 or later) and Android, plus a web app
• Notable limit: Hurdlr does not publish prices on its own pricing page

Why Hurdlr? Hurdlr tracks income as well as expenses and turns the two into a running tax estimate, so the question “how much of this payment is actually mine” has an answer before April. For anyone who has been surprised by a self-employment tax bill, that is a more useful daily number than a deduction total. The free tier is also unusual in offering unlimited mileage, with the catch that free tracking is semi-automatic — you start and stop it — while fully automatic mileage, expense and income tracking sit behind Premium. The app is well established, rated 4.7 from about 21,000 ratings on the US App Store.

What we like

• Real-time tax calculations that combine income and expenses, rather than deductions in isolation.
• Unlimited mileage on the free tier, where competitors cap it at 5, 30 or 40 trips a month.
• Income tracking across multiple streams suits people working several platforms or clients.
• A long track record and a 4.7 rating across roughly 21,000 App Store ratings.

Watch out for

• Hurdlr’s pricing page does not show prices. It lists Premium and Pro tiers with features and sends you into signup to learn the cost. The $9.99 and $99.99 figures above come from the in-app purchase list on Hurdlr’s US App Store page, read September 22, 2026 — and an App Store price is not necessarily the web price. Confirm before subscribing.
• Free mileage tracking is semi-automatic. “Unlimited” is doing some work in that sentence; automatic detection is a Premium feature.
• Hurdlr’s own description notes Premium features are primarily designed for the web app, so a phone-only workflow may not get everything you paid for.

Best for: multi-platform gig workers and freelancers who want to know their tax exposure as money lands.
Skip it if: you want to know exactly what you will pay before handing over a card.

See Hurdlr →

Which one is right for you

If you drive for a living — rideshare, delivery, couriering — mileage is your deduction and the trip caps decide everything. Stride is free with no cap and produces a report your preparer can use. Everlance Basic gives 30 automatic trips a month free, and Professional at $99.99–$119.99 a year adds automatic expenses and filing. MileIQ’s free 40 drives a month is the most generous automatic allowance if mileage is genuinely all you need.

If your business and personal spending share one account — the normal situation for freelancers and side-hustlers — the value is in something reading the transactions and flagging possible write-offs. That is Keeper’s design, and it is why Keeper costs $199 rather than $36. QuickBooks Solopreneur’s Lite tier at $20 a month is the alternative if you would rather categorise transactions yourself.

If you want to spend nothing at all, the real choice is Stride or QuickBooks Solopreneur Free, and they fail in different places: Stride has no bank scanning and no filing, while QuickBooks caps you at 5 trips and 2 receipts a month. Pick the one whose limit you will not hit.

If your taxes are complicated — multiple states, a K-1, a rental property, foreign income — you are past what a tracking app solves. Keeper’s Premium tier at $399 a year is priced for those situations, but at that point comparing against a local CPA is reasonable, and paying a person often beats paying software.

The 2026 mileage rate split, and why it matters

2026 is a two-rate year, and this is what most writing on this topic has not caught up with. The IRS set the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile in Notice 2026-10, announced December 29, 2025, up 2.5 cents from 2025’s 70 cents. Then, in Announcement 2026-11, it revised the rate upward to 76 cents per mile effective July 1, 2026, citing recent increases in the price of fuel. Medical and moving moved the same way, from 20.5 to 23.5 cents. The charitable rate stayed at 14 cents, because that one is set by statute rather than by the IRS.

The current table on the IRS standard mileage rates page, last updated July 28, 2026, shows both halves of the year separately. Mid-year changes like this are rare — the last was in 2022 — and they create two practical problems.

First, your app has to date every trip and apply the right rate to each half of the year. A tool that multiplies annual mileage by one rate is wrong either way: apply 72.5 cents to the whole year and you understate every mile driven since July; apply 76 cents to the whole year and you overstate the first six months. On 10,000 business miles split evenly, the difference between the halves is about $175 of deduction — not enormous, but wrong on a document you are signing.

Second, anything you exported or estimated before August 2026 probably used the old rate. If you ran a mid-year projection to size your quarterly payments, it is low, and worth re-running. Before trusting any app’s mileage total this year, open its rate settings and confirm it knows about both rates and the July 1 boundary.

What the IRS actually requires you to keep

An app is only useful if what it produces satisfies the rule. On business use of a car, IRS Topic 510 — last updated May 6, 2026 — sets out two methods: the standard mileage rate, or actual expenses, where you total the real costs of running the vehicle and deduct the business-use share. You may work out both and use whichever is larger.

Two details change how you should use these apps. The first-year election is binding: Topic 510 states that to use the standard mileage rate for a car you own, you must choose it in the first year that car is available for use in your business. Choose it then and you can switch methods later; fail to choose it in year one and the standard rate is off the table for that vehicle. Any app that only tracks miles is quietly assuming you made that election.

Substantiation is a legal requirement, not a best practice. Topic 510 puts it plainly: the law requires that you substantiate your expenses by adequate records or by sufficient evidence to support your own statement. That is the actual reason to run one of these apps rather than reconstructing a year from memory in March. A contemporaneous log — dates, miles, purpose — is the record; what differs between these apps is whether you have to remember to press a button to create it.

Unreimbursed employee travel is a separate matter. The IRS’s 2026 rate announcement repeats that taxpayers cannot claim a miscellaneous itemised deduction for unreimbursed employee travel expenses, with narrow exceptions for certain reservists, some state and local officials, certain performing artists and eligible educators. If your driving is for an employer who does not reimburse you, a tracking app will not turn those miles into a deduction.

What the free tiers really cost you

Five of these six apps advertise something free, and the word means five different things: Stride is free with no paid tier, funded by health-insurance commissions; QuickBooks Solopreneur Free is permanent but capped at 5 mileage trips, 2 receipts and 2 invoices a month; Everlance Basic gives 30 auto-detected trips a month plus unlimited manual logging; MileIQ Free is 40 automatic drives a month, then it stops; Hurdlr is free with unlimited but semi-automatic mileage, with automation as the paid upgrade.

Trials are not free tiers and behave differently. Keeper’s is 14 days and its site is explicit that filing requires the paid annual plan. Everlance’s is 7 days and its FAQ states the card is charged at the end of it. Neither is a trap if you diarise it; both are if you do not.

The honest summary: a free tier is only free if its cap sits above your usage. Work out your real monthly trip and receipt counts first, then read the caps, and the shortlist usually writes itself. And whatever you choose, the subscription is itself an ordinary business expense — a reason to compare after-tax cost rather than sticker price, and a reason not to over-buy, since a deduction returns a fraction of what you spend, never all of it.

Tracking deductions is only half the job

Finding write-offs lowers what you owe. It does not change when you owe it, and that is where self-employed people more often get hurt.

Per the IRS self-employment tax page, reviewed June 27, 2026, the self-employment tax rate is 15.3% — 12.4% for Social Security plus 2.9% for Medicare — and you generally must file a Schedule SE if your net earnings from self-employment were $400 or more. That sits on top of income tax, and it is the number that surprises people in their first self-employed year. You can deduct the employer-equivalent portion when figuring adjusted gross income, which softens it slightly.

Separately, the IRS estimated taxes page, reviewed June 28, 2026, states that individuals including sole proprietors, partners and S corporation shareholders generally have to make estimated tax payments if they expect to owe $1,000 or more when the return is filed. The year is divided into four payment periods; the exact due dates are on Form 1040-ES, which is also what you use to work the payments out.

This is why Hurdlr’s running estimate and Keeper’s Premium-tier quarterly support are worth something beyond deduction-finding. It is also why money set aside for those payments should sit somewhere it earns — see our guides to high-yield savings accounts and what $10,000 actually earns in a year. Parking a quarter’s tax money in a checking account is a small, avoidable loss repeated four times a year.

What didn’t make the list, and why

FreshBooks and Zoho Expense were both considered and both dropped for fit, not quality. FreshBooks is invoicing-and-accounting software that tracks expenses well — Lite is $23 a month at the regular price with a 5-billable-client cap, currently advertised at $1 a month for the first year, with a 30-day trial requiring no credit card. Zoho Expense is a corporate travel-and-expense tool whose free plan covers up to 3 users and 5 GB of receipts, with Standard at $3 per user a month billed annually. Both are good at what they do; neither maps expenses to a self-employed tax outcome, which is what this page is about.

Expensify was dropped because we could not read a current, complete price list from its own pricing page at the time of checking. We do not publish prices we cannot verify at source.

Pure tax-filing software — the seasonal products you open in March — was excluded by definition. These are year-round tracking tools; a filing product that does not watch your transactions in July solves a different problem.

Spreadsheets. Not a joke entry. A dated spreadsheet with miles, purpose and amounts satisfies the substantiation requirement in Topic 510 perfectly well. It loses to these apps on automation and on nothing else, and for someone with fifteen transactions a year it is the correct answer.

When you don’t need one of these at all

You have one W-2 and take the standard deduction. Then there is no self-employment schedule, no mileage deduction and nothing to track. The tax-prep side of Keeper or Everlance is also poor value against free and low-cost filing routes; IRS Free File is open to filers under an adjusted gross income threshold the IRS publishes each season.

Your self-employment is genuinely small. If you earned a few hundred dollars from a side project and drove twice for it, a $199-a-year app cannot pay for itself — a deduction returns only your marginal rate on the amount found, not the amount itself. Note the $400 net-earnings threshold for Schedule SE is low, so small still means filing; it just does not mean subscribing.

You already have a bookkeeper or CPA who wants records their way. Ask before you buy. A preparer who works in one system often prefers a clean spreadsheet to an export from an app they do not use, and paying for software your preparer ignores is the most common wasted subscription in this category.

One more thing none of these apps does: decide what is deductible. They capture, categorise and total. Whether a specific expense is an ordinary and necessary business expense for you is a question for the IRS’s own guidance or a qualified professional — and the audit-defence add-ons some of them sell are assistance, not immunity.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free app for tracking tax deductions?

It depends where the caps bite. Stride is free with no trip limit and no paid tier at all, which makes it the best choice for heavy drivers with no budget. QuickBooks Solopreneur’s free plan is the most complete — mileage, receipts and invoices together — but stops at 5 mileage trips, 2 receipts and 2 invoices a month. MileIQ’s free tier allows 40 automatic drives a month and Everlance Basic allows 30, but both are mileage-first. Work out your real monthly volume, then pick the one whose cap you will not hit.

What is the IRS mileage rate for 2026?

There are two. The business standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile for January 1 through June 30, 2026, and 76 cents per mile from July 1 through December 31, 2026 — the IRS revised it mid-year in Announcement 2026-11, citing fuel price increases. Medical and moving rates went from 20.5 cents to 23.5 cents on the same date. The charitable rate is 14 cents for the whole year. Check that your app applies both rates to the correct halves of the year.

Is Keeper worth $199 a year?

It is worth it if you are self-employed, your business and personal spending share the same accounts, and you would otherwise pay separately for an expense tracker, tax software and professional help — Standard bundles year-round write-off scanning with federal and state e-filing reviewed and signed by a tax pro. It is poor value if you have a single W-2 and simple taxes, or if your business spending already runs through a dedicated business account, because the scanning then solves a problem you do not have. Our full Keeper review goes through the plan differences and the renewal terms.

Do I need to pay quarterly taxes if I use one of these apps?

The app has nothing to do with it. Per the IRS, individuals including sole proprietors generally have to make estimated tax payments if they expect to owe $1,000 or more when the return is filed, across four payment periods, using Form 1040-ES. What a good app does is tell you what you are likely to owe in time to pay it — Hurdlr’s real-time estimate and Keeper’s Premium-tier quarterly support exist for that reason.

Standard mileage rate or actual expenses — which should I use?

IRS Topic 510 lets you figure the deduction either way and use whichever is larger, but there is a catch in the timing: to use the standard mileage rate for a car you own, you must choose it in the first year that car is available for use in your business. After that first year you can switch methods. Actual expenses tends to win for expensive vehicles with high running costs; the standard rate tends to win for cheap, efficient, high-mileage cars — and it requires far less record-keeping.

Will one of these apps protect me in an audit?

Not by itself. What it provides is the contemporaneous record the law requires — Topic 510 says you must substantiate expenses by adequate records or sufficient evidence to support your own statement, and a dated log is exactly that. Some products bundle assistance: Everlance Professional advertises a $1 million audit defence, and Keeper places audit protection on its Premium tier rather than Standard. Those are help with the process, not a guarantee of the outcome.

Bottom line

Start free and upgrade only when a cap actually stops you. QuickBooks Solopreneur’s free plan is the most complete zero-cost option if you drive little; Stride is the better free choice if you drive a lot. The paid tiers earn their price in one case — when something needs to read your bank transactions and find deductions you would never have recorded — and that is where Keeper at $199 a year fits, with Everlance Professional at $119.99 the cheaper route to getting filing included.

Whatever you pick, do the two-minute check that matters more than the subscription: confirm the app applies 72.5 cents a mile before July 1, 2026 and 76 cents after it. A mileage total built on one rate for the whole year is wrong on a form you are going to sign.

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