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Following on from our look at businesses using smartphone apps were looking at the developers today. The pricing of apps for smartphones is fascinating for a geek like me and talking to developer in Leamington Spa was interesting because Agant created the very first smartphone app that I was too cheap to buy.

Cast your minds back to the heady early days of smartphones and a friend demonstrated a clever and free app that showed live train data. At the same time as that was impressing me it was causing a headache for Agant since they'd just spent eight months creating their own train times app and they were looking to recoup the costs.

There followed a bit of a tussle and Agant's official version won out. But since I don't use the train that often I found the £4.99 price tag a bit much and was very envious of my friends free version that he downloaded before it was withdrawn.

These days Agant's train app is one of the top fifty grossing apps for the Apple iphone and today it faces competing and completely legit lower price apps including some that are free. But the fact this small company has created digital content that people will pay good money for is no mean achievement. And as I watched them demonstrate the Rail Times app and others I was impressed.

But as we've established I'm cheap, so isn't there some sort of free trial Agant could use to entice people like me? Apparently Apple (and these are apple only apps I'm afraid) don't allow this. Indeed the competiting Android OS has just moved in this direction too by reducing its "buy and try" refund window from 24 hours to just .

And that's the thing. There's no doubt everyone from coffee shops to cathedrals are finding apps good for business. (The Bishop of Hereford was fascinated by the for Birmingham Cathedral when I was there last week!) And there's money to be made by developers too. Creating a system where people will happily pay for digital content is to pretty impressive. But in the end it's Apple, Google and Nokia who make the rules for the shops. And that's a lot of control over a young company's income stream.

As ever if you have a favourite app or are a developer working on something really cool do let me know in the comments or email me.

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