Today vs. All-Time: which board should you bid for

There's only one ledger of payments behind Outbidly — every successful bid is a single row, tied to a listing. All-Time is that ledger's full sum: everything ever paid toward a listing, added up, forever. Today isn't a separate pool of money — it's the same ledger filtered down to just the payments made since 00:00 UTC. You're never choosing which board to "put your money in." A single $10 payment counts fully toward both your listing's Today total and its All-Time total, at the same time.

Today clears to $0 at 00:00 UTC. That's a live filter on which bids fall since midnight — checked against the real timestamps in the database every time the board is loaded — not a stored running total that gets zeroed out by a scheduled job. There's no cron task that could silently fail to run, no maintenance window, and no cached snapshot that goes stale. The moment the clock crosses 00:00 UTC, any bid placed before that instant simply stops matching the "since midnight" filter, and the board reflects that on the very next read.

Today rewards recency, not cumulative spend, which makes it the better fit when:

• You have a specific day (or few days) where attention actually matters — a launch, a live event, a limited-time promotion — and you want to be the most visible thing on the board precisely then.
• You're working with a smaller budget. Because Today resets daily, the total needed to lead it is usually far lower than the total needed to lead All-Time once All-Time has accumulated money over time — a modest, well-timed bid can realistically take #1 on Today.
• You'd rather compete against "whoever else bid today" than "everyone who has ever bid, cumulatively" — a much smaller, resettable field.

All-Time rewards durability, which makes it the better fit when:

• You want a rank that doesn't evaporate at midnight. Once you've paid enough to hold a position on All-Time, you hold it indefinitely — until someone else pays more, not until the next day arrives.
• You're building visibility over weeks or months rather than around a single event, and you'd rather have a standing, compounding total than a number that resets and has to be re-earned daily.
• You want the reassurance that comes with permanence: nothing about your position depends on remembering to check back before midnight.

Because every payment counts toward both boards automatically, there's no real tradeoff in choosing — the question is really about sequencing your budget, not splitting it. A common pattern: put a meaningful amount in around a specific moment (a launch day) to win Today when it counts most, and let that same money keep compounding toward your All-Time position afterward at no extra cost. You don't need a separate "All-Time budget" and "Today budget" — you need one budget, spent with the right timing.

Neither board favors a listing for being first, for being old, or for anything other than total paid. There's no loyalty bonus for a listing that's been on the board since day one, and no penalty for a brand-new one — both are ranked purely by total_cents, with ties broken by whichever listing reached its current total least recently. Today's reset doesn't "punish" a listing that was #1 yesterday any more than it "rewards" a listing that bids for the first time today; it's simply a different window on the same rule.