Every request you can make buys one board read. So at any fixed rate, the same budget stretches two ways: one board refreshed every two seconds, or five boards refreshed every ten. Both cost the same per second, and they are not the same product. The choice is a freshness trade, and you can compute it before you spend anything.
The budget equation
The cost calculator turns a schedule into requests: hours divided by the interval, times active hours, times boards per cycle, checked 2026-10-09. Read it backward and it becomes the freshness rule: at a fixed requests-per-second budget, boards times freshness-per-board is a constant. Double the boards and each one is fresh half as often.
Nothing about this is hidden or optimistic. It is the arithmetic of a rate limit doing exactly what it says.
Worked: one fast board against five slow ones
Take the middle preset, the REST plan at 10 requests a second for $99 a month, listed on the same calculator, checked 2026-10-09. One sport's live board every two seconds uses 0.5 requests a second. Five sports at that freshness need 2.5 a second, a quarter of the plan. All thirteen boards at two seconds would need 6.5 a second, inside the plan but with little left for retries.
The same plan run differently is a different product: a fast single-league feed, or a broad board that updates every few seconds, or a slow everything-monitor. The price is identical; only the freshness allocation changes.
When depth wins and when breadth wins
Depth wins when you act on one market: a trading or alerting product on one league wants the fastest board it can hold. Breadth wins when you watch for events: a scanner looking for moves across many sports wants coverage, and can trade seconds of freshness for sports it would otherwise never see.
Most real products want both, which is why the interval is usually split: live boards fast, prematch boards slow, because the two phases move at different speeds and the cost of treating them alike is paid in freshness on the one that matters.
The knob you actually turn
You do not tune the budget; the plan sets that. You tune the interval per board, per phase, and the transport guide is where the question changes shape entirely, because a stream replaces interval thinking with push. Until you cross that line, the freshness trade is the whole game.
Boards times freshness is a constant at any rate. Spend the constant deliberately, and the plan you buy stops being a guess.