Google describes it as the combination of crawl capacity limit, meaning how fast it can fetch without straining your server, and crawl demand, meaning how much it wants to based on your site's popularity and how often content changes. Waste comes from crawlers spending requests on URLs that do not matter: endless filter and sort parameters, internal search results, session IDs, duplicate pages, soft 404s and long redirect chains. Google has stated plainly that most sites under a few thousand URLs do not need to think about this at all.
That exemption covers nearly every contractor, clinic and firm, so treat crawl budget as a diagnosis of last resort rather than a first explanation for pages not being indexed. If a fifty page service site has unindexed pages, the cause is far more likely thin content, a stray noindex tag, a bad canonical or no internal links pointing at them. Where it does become real is a large programmatic build, such as thousands of service and city combinations, where parameter driven duplicates can consume crawling that should be going to your actual pages.
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