Aspects of the technology described herein allocate limited computing resources, such as available bandwidth and battery power, to transferring the most urgent and important data from a client device to an online service. Client devices have enormous amounts of information about the user's activities that could be communicated to the service at any given time. However, the wireless transfer of information uses available battery power and can consume a user's data plan. The technology described herein uses a model to determine how often information should be sent to a service. The model can also determine what information to send. Different models can be implemented in different scenarios. The different models can include different weighting that will produce different decisions given the same inputs.