Notebook · 8 June 2026 · 5–6 min read · Alpesh Patel

What every mileage app asks for.

Before we built ours, we sat down and installed the popular mileage trackers one after another — the way a new user would. The striking thing wasn’t any single feature. It was how much each one asks you to hand over before it will log a single mile.

The first five minutes

Install a typical subscription mileage tracker, and the first few minutes look something like this. Not every app does every step, and the order varies — but across the leading ones, this is the shape of it:

• Create an account — an email and a password. Your phone offers to save the password to your keychain, which tells you there’s now a credential to manage.
• Confirm the email — sometimes with a “does this look right?” check, because the address matters to them.
• Hand over a phone number for “SMS updates” — skippable, if you spot the small “do this later”.
• Grant location — fair enough, it’s a mileage tracker. Then a second prompt to upgrade that to Always.
• Grant Motion & Fitness, and on some apps, Bluetooth — one of them scans for the devices around your car to pair a beacon, which iOS itself warns can build a profile of you.
• Answer the App Tracking Transparency prompt: “Allow this app to track your activity across other companies’ apps?”
• Decline, or accept, an offer to link your bank or credit card.
• Meet a paywall — often a countdown to a free-trial charge — before you’ve recorded a mile.

None of this is a scandal. Each step has a reason from the app-maker’s side: the account anchors a subscription, the email and number feed lifecycle marketing, the cross-app tracking feeds ad attribution, the bank link feeds an expenses upsell. It’s a coherent machine. It’s just a machine you’re feeding before you’ve got anything back.

What ours asks for

Mileage Tracker opens to the app. There is no account screen, because there is no account. To do its one job — notice when you’re driving and log the trip — it asks for the permission it genuinely needs: location, including in the background, so it can catch a drive even when the app is closed. We ask for that one honestly, and we tell you why at the moment we ask.

That’s the ask. Here’s the rest of the list — the things we’ve designed the app so it never has to request:

• No account, no password. Nothing to create, nothing to remember, nothing to be breached in a database somewhere — because there is no database somewhere. Your records live on your phone.
• No email or phone number. We have no newsletter to add you to and no SMS to send, so there’s no field for either.
• No cross-app tracking prompt. There are no ads and no third-party trackers in the app, so the “track you across other apps” question never comes up.
• No bank or card linking. Your finances are none of our business, and we built the app so it can’t become our business later.
• No paywall before you’ve used it. When it launches it’s a single, one-time purchase — not a countdown to a charge you have to cancel.

Why the difference isn’t really about virtue

It would be easy to frame this as us being the principled ones. The more honest framing is that the long onboarding and the short onboarding are each a direct consequence of a business model.

An app funded by a monthly subscription needs the account — that’s where the billing relationship lives. An app that wants to keep you needs your email and your number to win you back when you drift. An app that monetises attention needs the cross-app tracking. The asks aren’t bolted on; they’re the foundations of how that app makes money from you over time.

We make our money once, when you buy the app, and then the relationship is essentially done — in the good way. We don’t need to retain you, re-market to you, or profile you, so we didn’t build the machinery that would. The short onboarding isn’t a feature we added. It’s what’s left when you remove the reasons for the long one.

The one thing we will always ask

We’re not going to pretend we ask for nothing. Background location is a real, meaningful permission, and a mileage tracker that captures drives on its own can’t work without it. So we’ll always ask for that one, we’ll always explain it in plain words before the system prompt appears, and the deal attached to it is simple: that location data stays on your device — there’s no account, and we don’t run it through a Keepwright server or any analytics that follows you. Drawing your route on a map does send those points to an open mapping service, but never to us; a built-in privacy view shows you exactly what’s stored on the phone, so you can see for yourself.

One honest ask, explained, with the data kept where you can see it. That’s the whole arrangement — and after the first five minutes with the alternatives, it’s the part we’re most glad we got right.

See the side-by-side on the alternatives page, or work out what you could claim with the free Mileage Calculator.

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