The Free App I Won't Pay $0.99 to Use

Today, I was searching for a way to track my gas mileage. I came across two services, web apps, which would allow me to input my odometer reading, price per gallon, and total gallons of fuel, every time I visited the gas station to fill up my car. I thought it would be really great if I could enter this information straight into my phone, either by text message or iPhone app.

I came across two very similar web sites: Fuelly and FuelFrog.

I investigated Fuelly first.

Is Fuelly free to sign up and use? Yes. Will it track my gas mileage? Yes. Will it create some nice graphs of my data over time? Yes. So far so good. Is there an app for iPhone? Well, kinda. There's a mobile website which can be bookmarked and set as an icon on the home screen.

I do prefer native apps, so I looked at FuelFrog.

FuelFrog seems to be very similar, with at least all the same capabilities. There's even a public API, which I think is just delightful. On their home page, I see the "available on the app store" graphic and click on it, landing on the app's iTunes page.

FuelFrog is free to sign up for on their website. As far as I can tell, I can use their service completely free of charge. However, their iPhone app is $0.99. Really? A buck to use a native app for a free service? I could easily send a text message. I could easily load up their site in Safari and enter my data. There's a public API! I could write my own app to enter data into their free service! But, if I want to use their iPhone app, I have to purchase it for $0.99 so they can get, what, $.70 out of me?

Needless to say, I've started using Fuelly absolutely free. It's not that I can't afford $0.99, and maybe I'll switch in the future, but is it really worth having that extra barrier to entry? Does FuelFrog really depend on App Store sales for revenue?

What other businesses are charging for their app when they should be giving it away for free?