What this site is
WorthTheDash is a small set of free calculators for people who deliver food and groceries for a living or for a second income: whether the offer glowing on the phone right now clears the hourly rate you set for yourself, what a mile in your particular car actually costs you in cash, what a finished shift really paid once the car and a tax set-aside come out, what your business miles are worth as a deduction, and how the pay structures behind the offer screen are put together.
There are five pages. The flagship offer calculator updates a verdict as you type — no submit button — and builds a personal Decline Sheet: for each offer amount, the most miles that offer can be and still hit your target, boiled down to one memorizable rule of the form "at least $X for the stop, plus $Y for every mile." The cost-per-mile page works out the single number the whole site runs on. The real hourly pay page shows one shift three honest ways: operating cash after the vehicle, a standard-mileage tax illustration, and a spendable estimate after a reserve percentage you pick yourself. The mileage deduction page handles 2026's split-year rates and the first-year election trap. The platform pay page is written rather than computed — it explains per-offer versus earn-by-time, restaurant delivery versus shop-and-deliver, stacked offers, and why tips on the offer screen are an estimate with upside rather than a promise.
Every one of them runs entirely inside your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere, there is no account to create, and there is no app to install. Most of these pages get opened one-handed, parked outside a restaurant, with about a minute of usable attention. That constraint drove nearly every design decision here, including the safety line asking you to set the tool up while parked.
Who builds it
WorthTheDash is built and maintained by one person — an independent developer working alone. It is not a company, not a startup with a team behind it, and not a driver-advocacy organization. I do not work for DoorDash, Uber, Grubhub, Instacart, or Walmart, and this site is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, or connected to any of them. No platform reviewed this content, no platform pays to appear here, and no page recommends a product in exchange for anything. I am also not an accountant, an enrolled agent, or a tax attorney, and nothing here is professional advice.
The site is funded by advertising, which is disclosed in the privacy policy. This page and the privacy page deliberately carry no ads at all.
That matters for how you should read what follows. The value here is not someone's expert opinion about your market. There is no expert opinion on this site. The value is that every constant is traceable to a public primary document you can open yourself, that the arithmetic in between is independently tested, and that where the honest answer is "it depends on facts I cannot see," the page says exactly that instead of producing a confident-sounding number.
Where the numbers come from
The rule is: primary sources only — the IRS, federal statistical agencies, or a platform's own published help documentation — cited on the page where the number is used, with the date it was verified. Not driver forums, not YouTube, not an average of whatever a search engine surfaced.
- Mileage deduction rates — IRS guidance for the 2026 split year, taken from the IRS newsroom announcement and the corresponding Internal Revenue Bulletin: 72.5¢ per business mile for expenses before July 1, 2026, and 76¢ on or after that date, with 70¢ retained for 2025. A mid-year change is exactly the kind of thing a stale calculator gets quietly wrong, so both halves are entered separately rather than blended.
- Which method you may use — IRS Topic 510, quoted rather than paraphrased, for the rule that a car you own must be put on the standard mileage rate in the first year it is available for business use, and that choosing the standard rate for a leased car commits you to it for the entire lease period including renewals.
- Self-employment tax — IRS material on Schedule SE: generally 15.3% applied to 92.35% of net self-employment earnings, roughly 14.1% effective, before the Social Security wage base, Additional Medicare Tax, and the deduction for one half of self-employment tax. The site says plainly that this is not your total tax, because income tax sits on top of it.
- Parking, tolls, and records — Schedule C instructions and Publication 463 for the fact that business parking and tolls deduct in addition to the mileage rate, that ordinary commuting is generally not deductible, and that contemporaneous records — kept at or near the time of use — carry more weight than a reconstruction assembled in April.
- Vehicle operating costs — the AAA Your Driving Costs 2025 fact sheet for the maintenance, repair and tire benchmark of 11.04¢ per mile, and for the full all-in new-car context figures. Those AAA numbers are published on a new-vehicle basis, which is why the site treats them as context rather than as your decision number, and asks you to supply your own wear reserve instead of inventing a depreciation figure for a paid-off older car.
- Fuel prices — the U.S. Energy Information Administration's weekly retail gasoline series supplies the default pump price, shown with the week it was taken from and fully editable, because a national average is a starting point and your local price is the fact.
- Platform mechanics — structural claims only, sourced to the platforms' own help pages: the decision window DoorDash's dasher help describes, and Instacart's published description of what batch pay reflects, including driving distance, item count, and expected shopping time. Where a comparable detail could not be verified in a platform's own documentation, it was left out of the copy rather than guessed at.
You will notice something absent: dollar figures for what any platform pays. Those change constantly and vary by market, so publishing them on a static page would produce confident-looking numbers that quietly rot. Structures age well; rates do not. If a number anywhere on this site appears without a source beside it, treat that as a defect and report it — it gets a citation or it gets removed.
How the math is checked
Every calculator has a matching test in an automated suite that re-implements the same formula independently and checks the answer, rather than checking the page against itself. Where a page carries a worked example, that example is a test, so the narrative and the code cannot silently drift apart. The Decline Sheet algebra — the equivalence between "maximum miles at this offer amount" and the floor rule "pays at least the stop cost plus the per-mile cost times the miles" — was derived once, then re-derived independently before it shipped, and is now pinned by hundreds of randomized cases.
The suite also enforces the editorial promises this site makes to drivers. Money always rounds up to the cent and miles always round down, so the rounding itself can never flatter an offer. Repositioning miles can only ever raise the cost of an offer, never lower it, which a property test checks across hundreds of random combinations. A tax reserve is floored at zero, because a losing shift does not mail you a refund. And the pages that are supposed to be free of advertising — this one and the privacy policy — are tested for the absence of the ad loader, because Google's publisher policies do not permit ads on screens without publisher content.
Nothing gets deployed unless the whole suite passes: currently forty-four assertions, zero failures. That does not make the site infallible. A test can only check the formula it was handed, and a formula can be implemented perfectly and still be the wrong model for how you work. What testing buys is that a typo in a rate, a broken conversion, or a page that lost its sourcing gets caught before a driver ever sees it.
What these calculators will not tell you
They will never tell you that an order is worth taking. That verdict is not this site's to give.
What the flagship page reports is narrower and more useful: your own numbers, applied consistently, against the threshold you set. If it says an offer is below target, that means below your target, computed from your cost per mile and your pace assumptions. Change the inputs and the answer changes, which is the point.
The limits are real and worth naming. The tool cannot see your market — whether declining this offer means the next one arrives in ninety seconds or in twenty minutes, which is often the entire difference between two identical-looking offers. It cannot see traffic, weather, a parking garage, a fourth-floor walk-up, or an apartment complex where the gate code never works. It cannot see the platform's current promotion, your standing, or a rule change shipped last week; pay models move, and your app's current terms govern, not this page. On the tax side it cannot see your filing status, your household's other income, a spouse's withholding, your state — the tax content here is federal only and says so — or any of the other deductions a real return would carry. The pace defaults are starter assumptions, not measured platform averages, and they stay wrong until you replace them with numbers from your own trips.
So use these outputs the way you would use a first estimate: to size a decision, to notice when your instincts are off by a factor rather than a rounding error, to walk into a shift with a rule in your head instead of a folk maxim from a forum. For anything expensive or irreversible — a return you are about to file, a vehicle you are about to finance, a decision to go full time — talk to a tax professional or an advisor who can see your actual situation. This site cannot.
How often it's reviewed
Pages carrying rates, prices, or platform mechanics are re-checked against their sources at least twice a year, and immediately whenever a source changes: new IRS mileage guidance, a mid-year rate revision, a new AAA cost publication, a rewritten platform help page. Pages built on arithmetic that does not move are re-checked annually. A page that has been re-verified carries a review stamp beside its citation line, and that stamp is a promise — it means the sources behind that page were actually opened again on that date, not that the file was edited. The current review pass is July 2026.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, a rate has been superseded, a platform has changed how something works, or a page reads in a way that would push a driver toward a bad decision, tell me. The site uses a single contact address, published in the privacy policy and linked as "Feedback" in the footer of every page. Corrections take priority over new features, always. Include the page and, where you have it, the document that contradicts what is written — that turns a fix from a research project into ten minutes.
Requests are welcome too. A shop-and-deliver mode for grocery batches, where item count and shopping time dominate rather than distance, and a proper multi-stop input for stacked offers are both known gaps, openly flagged on the pages themselves rather than papered over.
Privacy, briefly
Whatever you type stays on your device. The calculators are plain JavaScript running in your browser; there is no server that receives your earnings, your miles, or your offer history, because no server is involved beyond delivering the page itself. Your saved profile and your last several offers live in your browser's own local storage, and clearing your site data erases them completely. There is no account, so there is nothing to delete. Full details, including how the advertising and the privacy-focused analytics work, are in the privacy policy.