How we rate CS2 marketplaces
Our markets directory currently covers 36 venues. Every fact on those pages follows the rules below. Where we do not have a verified fact, the page shows nothing instead of a guess.
What we record for every venue
- Fees — the standard seller commission and any buyer markup, as published by the platform itself. Tiered or promotional rates are kept as notes, not folded into the headline rate.
- Money in, money out — deposit methods, cash-out methods and per-rail fee notes, including whether cash-out exists at all (Steam, for example, has none).
- KYC — whether identity verification is required never, conditionally, or for cash-out.
- Region blocks — the countries where the platform denies service; these drive which venues appear in your buy and sell tables.
- Delivery, speed and holds — bot vs P2P delivery, payout speed, and Steam’s trade-lock reality spelled out per venue.
- Operating status — active or shut down, with a link to the platform’s own announcement when a venue closes. Right now 2 of 36 listed venues are marked as shut down.
Sources are each platform’s own documentation (fee pages, help centers, terms), cross-checked against what the platform actually does. The whole registry was last verified on July 1, 2026; that date is shown on every market page.
Where the trust scores come from
The "trust score" on a market page is not our own rating. It is the venue’s public customer-review score (primarily from Trustpilot), recorded together with its review count, the source platform and the date we fetched it. Currently 35 of 36 venues carry a score, 12 of them with the source and fetch date attached; scores recorded before we started attributing sources are shown without a source claim until re-verified. Venues without a meaningful public score show none at all.
Editorial verdicts ("who this is for", "watch out for") are ours, and each record carries our own confidence level based on how well the platform documents itself.
What disqualifies a venue
- Gambling. Case-opening, jackpot, coinflip, roulette and betting sites are never listed, reviewed or linked — no exceptions, regardless of any payment offered.
- Shut-down venues are not silently deleted: they stay in the directory with a red status banner and a source link, and are removed from all buy and sell tables.
- Venues whose fees or payout mechanics we cannot verify from primary sources do not get a dossier until we can.
How the data updates
- Periodic verification passes re-check fees, rails, KYC and statuses against primary sources; the verification date on each page moves only when a pass actually happened.
- Status changes (shutdowns, region blocks) are applied out of band as soon as they are confirmed by the platform’s own announcement.
- Spotted a wrong fee or a stale fact? Email contact@steamdb.com. Corrections follow the editorial policy.
Conflicts of interest
We operate no marketplace and are not affiliated with any venue we compare. Unlaunched venues (for example MRKT) sit in "on the radar" mode with no rating: only live venues with verifiable data get rated. Every commercial relationship the site has is disclosed on How we make money. Review verdicts and table positions are not for sale.