Data freshness

Three tiers — real-time, standard, and delayed — let you pay only for the latency you actually need. Same data, same schema; the difference is how fast events reach you.

The three tiers

Tier	Latency	Use cases
Real-time	< 500ms from action	Betting, live UX, in-game alerts, push notifications
Standard	1–5 seconds	Fantasy apps, live scoreboards, dashboards
Delayed	30+ minutes	Editorial sites, archival, research, training datasets

Which tier do I need?

Betting / odds-related products: real-time is non-negotiable. The difference between 200ms and 2 seconds is the difference between profit and exposure.
Consumer fantasy or scoreboards: standard is fine — users can't perceive the difference, and you save substantially per request.
Content sites, recaps, archives: delayed tier. There's no UX benefit to faster updates for a recap published the next morning.

Per-sport selection

You can mix tiers per sport. A common shape: real-time NBA + NFL (where users follow live), standard for everything else, delayed for the news API.

💡

Tier upgrades are immediate — flip a switch in the dashboard and the next request uses the new tier. Downgrades take effect at the next billing cycle.

Tier on response

Every response includes the tier in meta.tier and the on-source time:

{
  "meta": {
    "tier": "realtime",
    "source_time": "2025-11-14T03:42:18.142Z",
    "served_time": "2025-11-14T03:42:18.382Z",
    "lag_ms": 240
  }
}