How we price CS2 skins

Where the data comes from

Listing prices and offer counts come from csmarketcap, our licensed market-data provider, which aggregates live listings from 36 marketplaces, including the Steam Community Market. We buy this feed under a commercial license; we do not scrape marketplaces ourselves.

• Item names, wear ranges, rarities, case contents and drop odds come from the CS2 game files and Valve’s official localization files, in all 28 catalog languages.
• Marketplace fees, payment rails, KYC rules, holds and blocked regions come from each platform’s own documentation, manually verified — see the review methodology.
• Steam sales analytics (sold volumes, median prices, buy orders) come from Steam Community Market data in the same snapshot.

We compile the raw provider rows into per-item variants: wear, StatTrak™ and Souvenir, Doppler phases and other special colors each resolve to their own price rows.

Snapshots and freshness

Every price on the site comes from a dated snapshot. The current one was captured on Jul 5, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC. Updated less than 1 h ago

• The timestamp next to every price table is the capture time of the data, never the build or page-render time.
• If a snapshot is older than 24 hours, the label turns amber; past 72 hours it turns red with an explicit "prices may be outdated" warning.
• Snapshots are currently refreshed manually, so gaps happen; an automated multiple-per-day schedule is being rolled out. Until then, the staleness colors are the honest signal.

The buy price: what you actually pay

Buy tables show the effective price, not the sticker ask:

you pay = listed ask × (1 + buyer fee)

Most venues charge the buyer nothing on top; where a venue adds a checkout markup, the row says "incl. N% fee" and the markup is already inside the number. The Steam Community Market price is pinned separately as the official reference, with the percentage difference against the best third-party offer.

The sell price: what you actually keep

Sell tables start from the highest live buy order on each venue and subtract that venue’s cut. The math differs by venue type:

• Marketplaces and P2P venues — net = buy order × (1 − seller commission). The standard commission rate per venue is shown on the row; tiered rates are documented on the market’s review page.
• Steam (official) — the seller receives the buyer’s price divided by 1.15 (the 5% Steam fee plus the 10% CS2 fee), which works out to about 13% off the gross — and the payout is Steam Wallet credit that can never be withdrawn as cash.
• Instant-sell and trade bots — the quoted price already contains the venue’s spread below market value, so no extra commission is subtracted.

How rows are ranked

Buy tables sort by effective price, cheapest first. Sell tables sort by net payout, highest first. That is the entire ranking algorithm: no venue can pay to move up, and no commercial relationship changes the order. Venues that are shut down or that block the visitor’s region are removed from actionable tables entirely (they remain visible, flagged, in the markets directory).

Region fit

The colored dot on every row is the geo-fit signal: it combines the venue’s blocked-region list, its payment and payout rails, and its regional focus, all from the verified market-facts registry. Venues that deny service to the visitor’s audience country (for example, venues blocking RU/BY for Russian-language visitors) are dropped from buy and sell tables rather than shown as false options.

Doppler phases and other special cases

• Doppler and Gamma Doppler phases (Phase 1–4, Ruby, Sapphire, Black Pearl, Emerald) are priced as separate variants where markets list them separately.
• Some knives (Survival, Paracord, Nomad, Skeleton) are listed only per phase, with no phase-agnostic listing. For those, the base Doppler page falls back to a representative phase price — so the number you see can reflect a specific phase rather than a phase-blind average.
• "Genuine" collectibles are listed on markets without the quality prefix, so we resolve them by the stripped name.

Currency conversion

• Provider prices are in USD. Ruble prices use the Central Bank of Russia rate captured with the snapshot: 77.23 ₽ per USD, fetched Jul 5, 2026 (source: cbr.ru).
• Other display currencies are converted with daily open-market rates from open.er-api.com; the rate date is stamped next to the table whenever a converted currency is shown.
• Converted prices are display estimates. Checkout always happens in the venue’s own currency, and your bank’s own conversion may differ.

Coverage of the current snapshot

These numbers are computed from the published dataset when the page is built, so they always describe the snapshot you are actually seeing.

Known limitations

• Prices are live asks and buy orders, not completed sales. A thin listing can sit far from where trades actually clear — check the offer counts on each row.
• Not every variant is quoted on every market: 6,059 variants in the current snapshot could not be matched to any live listing and show no price at all — by design, instead of a guessed one.
• Fee math uses each venue’s standard published rate. Tiered discounts, promo rates and per-rail withdrawal costs are documented as notes on the market review pages, not folded into the headline number.
• Float values, stickers and pattern premiums are not part of the price math yet: two listings of the same wear can differ for reasons the table does not model.
• FX rates are captured with the snapshot; between snapshots the real rate drifts.

Marketplace facts

Venue fees, rails, KYC, holds and operating statuses live in a separately verified registry (last verification: July 1, 2026). How it is compiled, and what disqualifies a venue, is documented in the review methodology.

Methodology changelog

• v1.0, July 2026. First published version of this page.
• July 2026. Payment-rail filters and quick picks added to buy and sell tables; buy/sell parity (same variant resolution on both sides). A dormant price-adjustment mechanism was removed from the pipeline outright, and all freshness labels were switched to capture timestamps.
• June 2026. Fee-aware, region-aware comparison layer: effective buy prices, net sell payouts, geo-fit, Doppler phase fallback, CBR-sourced ruble rates.
• April 2026. First archived price snapshots; snapshot history has been retained since.

Related pages

• How we rate CS2 marketplaces
• How we make money
• Editorial policy
• About Steam Dashboard