Cross-market CS2 skin price alerts, scored against one reference price

Ask ten marketplaces what a Karambit Doppler Phase 2 Factory New is worth and you get ten different answers, and most of them are not the same kind of number. BUFF163 quotes CNY. Trade sites quote a cash-out figure that already has their spread inside it. Store-model sites quote an ask that includes inventory markup. Steam quotes a price denominated in a wallet balance that cannot legally leave Steam. Some sites publish a "suggested" or "reference" price that is a modelled estimate, not something anyone paid.

So the phrase "20% below market" is close to meaningless on its own. Below which market? In which currency? Net of which fee? Realisable by whom? Plenty of buyers cannot complete a purchase on BUFF163 at all without a Chinese payment rail, and a Steam-denominated bargain is only a bargain if your plan for the item was always to spend the balance back inside Steam. A price you cannot realise is not a price. It is a quote.

CSWatcher resolves this by refusing to compare markets to each other. Every listing on every marketplace is scored against a single reference: CSFloat's Final price for that exact item name and wear. Final is a USD number, on the one market CSWatcher can actually transact on, and — not incidentally — the market where you could put the item back up yourself. That makes the reference a price with a plausible exit behind it rather than a regional quote or a model output.

The practical consequence is that a percentage means the same thing everywhere. A listing flagged at 12% under on CS.MONEY and one flagged at 12% under on DMarket are making the identical claim, in the identical unit, against the identical benchmark. You can set one threshold and have it behave consistently across all ten lanes, and you can compare two alerts that arrived from different sites without doing arithmetic in your head. Currency conversion happens before scoring, so a BUFF163 CNY listing arrives already expressed in the same terms as everything else.

Fees belong to the same argument, because a fee is part of whether a price is realisable. CSWatcher states four seller fees and only four, because those are the four it has verified: CSFloat 2%, BUFF163 2.5%, Skinport 12%, Steam 15%. For every other marketplace CSWatcher does not display a fee figure, because publishing a number we have not confirmed would be worse than publishing nothing. Check the market's own terms before you assume what a sale nets you there.

That third column is the one people underrate. An alert that drops you on a search results page for "Karambit Case Hardened Field-Tested" has handed you the beginning of a hunt, not a deal — by the time you have re-sorted, re-filtered and found the one unit with the seed you wanted, the reason you were alerted is frequently gone. Landing on the object itself is most of what makes a cross-market alert actionable at all, which is why CSWatcher treats link precision as a first-class property of a lane rather than a detail, and why it is stated honestly here where it is narrower.

Lanes are not equally fast, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Some markets publish a live feed of what is currently for sale; some publish a periodic export that is already a few minutes old when anyone reads it; some show an anonymous reader only the cheap end of the book and keep the rest behind a login. Those differences are properties of the venues, not settings you tune, and they decide what each lane is genuinely good for: a first-look race on one, a considered survey on another. Each marketplace page below says plainly which kind it is, so you can point the right rule at the right market instead of expecting all ten to behave identically.

Steam is the standing exception on data. It publishes float and paint seed — under its own names, Wear Rating and Pattern Template — but only to a signed-in browser, which is why that lane runs on your own Steam session through the free CSWatcher Bridge extension rather than on anything shared. Nobody hands CSWatcher a Steam login, and the data you get out of that lane is data your own account can already see.

Requests are counted on every plan, so you can see where the engine spends its time — but only Spectator is capped. Spectator gets 2,000 requests a cycle in total, shared across every marketplace it watches, which is enough to see the Tape, run a filter and evaluate the whole tool, and not much more. A Sniper pass or a Desk add-on has no cap on any marketplace: the count still runs, nothing is ever refused, and the only thing that stops a pass scanning is the pass ending.

Counting per marketplace even when nothing is capped is a deliberate choice: your account page shows a separate bar per marketplace, so you can see where the engine actually spends its time and point the effort at the market you trade. On Spectator, where the 2,000 are one shared pool, that view is also how you notice one greedy rule on one market quietly eating the allowance the other lanes were relying on.

The practical consequence for rule-writing on Spectator is that breadth costs more than precision. A tightly written rule — one item, one wear, a float window, a price ceiling — is cheap to run for a whole cycle. A wide-open filter across a large category is not. On the markets that filter server-side, tight rules are cheaper and return denser results, so there is no trade-off to make; on the rest, narrowing is still the difference between a pool that lasts the cycle and one that does not. On a pass the same discipline buys you speed rather than budget: a tight rule comes round again sooner.

Where the money moves is not a toggle and not a roadmap item — it is how the software is built, lane by lane. CSFloat is the flagship: Auto-Buy, Auto-Bargain (BETA), standing Buy Orders and Listing all live there, on your CSFloat API key. Buy Orders and Listing have no equivalent anywhere else in the product — they are CSFloat features, not general features that happen to start on CSFloat.

Steam, Tradeit.gg, DMarket, LIS-Skins, BUFF Market and Skinport Auto-Buy through your own logged-in session on that site. The free CSWatcher Bridge extension carries the request from your own browser: it sends exactly the purchase that site's own buy button sends, spending the balance you already hold there, behind the same spend ceiling, the typed ARM confirmation and a first-pass rule that never buys on the very first scan of a newly armed filter. Your login never reaches CSWatcher's servers. Skinport holds no balance, so its Auto-Buy secures the triggered listing in your Skinport cart and sends you the link to confirm the payment.

CSBoard, BUFF163 and Skins.com are alert-only, read-only by construction: those lanes physically send only GET requests, with no purchase call, no bid call and no listing call in their code paths. What you get on the three is a notification with a direct link straight to the listing; you open it and buy it yourself, on your own account, under that site's terms. Steam is read through your own signed-in session too — the only way it reveals float and paint seed — and pays from your Steam Wallet.

CSWatcher knows about these three and deliberately fetches nothing from them. We would rather list them here with a reason than quietly omit them.

• SkinSwap. The data is genuinely excellent — float, paint seed, explicit Doppler phase including Ruby and Sapphire, even fade percentage. It is among the richest feeds in the market. Its robots.txt disallows its API to every automated client, so CSWatcher does not call it. Not cannot — does not. We read the file and we honour it.
• Skin.Land. The same robots.txt decline, and a challenge wall in front of everything else. Two independent reasons to stay off it.
• SkinVault. Its item names carry no wear at all. A rule written for a Field-Tested skin can never match a row that says only the skin name, so there is genuinely nothing here to watch.

Rules only work where the underlying data exists. CSWatcher does not pretend otherwise, and the interface tells you when a rule cannot apply to a market you have enabled.

• Price and discount rules work on all ten. Every lane publishes a price, and every price is scored against CSFloat Final.
• Doppler phase rules work on DMarket, CSBoard, Skins.com, BUFF Market and Tradeit.gg, plus CSFloat itself. CS.MONEY additionally distinguishes Emerald and Ruby.
• Fade % and blue % rules work on CSBoard alone. No other lane publishes those figures, and CSWatcher does not estimate them.
• Paint-seed hunts work on seven markets — every lane that exposes a seed on the listing.

Every marketplace ships switched off. A fresh install makes zero requests to any market until you enable one, and it never enables one for you. You turn on the lanes you actually intend to buy on and leave the rest dark.

Every marketplace works on every plan, Spectator included — Spectator spends one shared pool of 2,000 requests a cycle across whichever lanes you switch on; a Sniper pass has no request cap on any marketplace.

Does CSWatcher buy for me on DMarket, Tradeit.gg, BUFF Market or any other market?

On Steam, Tradeit.gg, DMarket, LIS-Skins, BUFF Market and Skinport, yes — through your own logged-in session on that site, once you arm Auto-Buy with a typed confirmation. CSBoard, BUFF163 and Skins.com send only GET requests: you get an alert and a deep link, and you complete the purchase yourself on that site.

Why score everything against CSFloat rather than the market a listing sits on?

Because a market's own quote is denominated in that market's currency, fee regime and access requirements. CSFloat Final is a USD price on the venue CSWatcher can actually transact on, which makes one threshold behave identically across all ten lanes.

Do I need to install anything?

Only the free CSWatcher CSFloat Bridge extension for Chrome or Edge. CSWatcher itself runs in a browser tab — the extension is what carries each market request from your own connection rather than from one address shared by every customer.

Which plan do I need?

Every plan — Spectator, the free plan, included — reads all ten and alerts you; you buy by hand from the link. A Sniper pass ($7 for 7 days, $19 for 30, $45 for 90, paid once) is what buys for you on the seven marketplaces with Auto-Buy, and it has no request cap; Spectator shares one pool of 2,000 requests a cycle across the lanes you switch on.

Is Skinport supported?

Yes, since 2026-08-30. It was not for a long time, and the reason was honest: Skinport's free public API returns per-item averages with no float, no paint seed and no per-listing link, so float and seed rules could not have worked against it. CSWatcher now reads Skinport's own site feed instead — the same data the site itself shows you — which does carry the per-listing float, and it reads it from your browser through the Bridge extension, on your own session and in your own currency. Auto-Buy works on Skinport too: Skinport holds no balance, so it secures the triggered listing in your Skinport cart and sends you the link to confirm the payment.

CSWatcher is not affiliated with or endorsed by CSFloat, DMarket, CSBoard, LIS-Skins, BUFF163, Valve, Steam, Skins.com, BUFF Market, Tradeit.gg, Skinport, SkinSwap, Skin.Land or SkinVault. All marketplace names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.