Multi-apping: driving for more than one platform

Multi-apping means being logged into two or three delivery apps at the same time and taking whichever job comes first. Most drivers try it. Whether it makes you more money is less obvious than it looks.

Is it allowed?

Generally yes. You are self-employed, and the food-delivery platforms do not claim exclusivity - which is part of what makes you self-employed in the first place. What they do object to is accepting a job and then not doing it promptly, and that is the practical risk: acceptance and completion rates fall when you are juggling.

Parcel work is different. A booked Amazon Flex block or an Evri round is a commitment to a fixed body of work in a fixed window, and there is no realistic room to run food deliveries inside it.

When it helps

• Quiet periods - mid-afternoon, weekday lunchtimes - where a single app leaves you idle.
• Areas where one platform simply has few restaurants.
• Building up enough offers to be selective about distance and pay.

When it costs you

• Peak evenings, when one app already keeps you busy and juggling only adds mistakes.
• Anywhere late deliveries hurt your standing on a platform you rely on.
• When it pushes your mileage up faster than your earnings - two apps sending you across town in opposite directions is a lot of unpaid driving.

Keeping records across platforms

For tax there is one business and one Self Assessment return, however many apps you drive for. Your turnover is everything all of them paid you, added together.

Two things to get right:

1. Your 10,000-mile threshold is shared. Miles are counted per vehicle across the whole tax year, not per platform, so the rate drops based on your combined total.
2. Keep the earnings separated by platform anyway. It is the only way to answer "which of these is actually worth my Friday night", even though the tax return does not care.

JoltMile records the platform on every shift and lets you filter your earnings summary by it, so you get one tax figure and a per-platform comparison from the same records.

A sensible way to test it

Work a fortnight single-apping and a fortnight multi-apping, in similar hours and weather, and compare earnings after costs per hour. Two weeks is enough to see past one bad night, and a comparison against your own driving beats any general claim about which approach pays more.