The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.
Apollo also does polling of the message box for each user for push notifications ( https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/main/i... ) which currently has a rate of 1/minute/user. This is another 1.4k calls per day and changes the price that would be paid.
Current rate: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
March 16th rate update (6 r/m to 1r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/74a8...
Nov 22nd rate update (12 r/m to 6 r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/7582...
Those rates are BEST CASE. I linked the code directly to you that actually does it in your previous comment.
They queue 100[0] users every 5[1] seconds to pull their status, they then update the next check timestamp in the db to be at now + the constant you quote[2] which they use for rate limiting, so at most once per minute.
So unless they have under 1,000 users, then it won't ever be "every single minute."
[0]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
[1]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
[2]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...