BUFF Market price alerts: find underpriced skins scored against CSFloat

CSWatcher's rule engine is only as expressive as the data a market chooses to publish. BUFF Market is one of the better-furnished sources it reads. Four attribute families come through, and they determine exactly which rule types can fire here.

Float value. Published per listing, so the full float toolkit works: minimum and maximum float bounds, wear-band targeting, and the low-float and high-float edge cases that matter for Factory New sub-0.01 and Battle-Scarred extremes. A BUFF Market float rule behaves the same way it does on CSFloat — same field, same comparison, same threshold semantics.

Paint seed. Also published per listing, which is the field most alert tools quietly lack. Pattern-dependent skins — Case Hardened blues, Marble Fade fire-and-ice, Crimson Web webs, Fade percentages that derive from seed on certain skins — are only findable if the seed rides along with the price. It does here, so BUFF Market paint seed rules fire natively: seed equals, seed in a list, seed combined with a float bound and a price ceiling in one rule. CSWatcher matches the seed number BUFF Market reports; it does not compute a blue percentage or a fade percentage for you, because those are derived values that no market publishes and CSWatcher does not invent numbers it cannot verify.

Doppler phase. Published as a phase label, so Phase 1 through Phase 4, Ruby, Sapphire and Black Pearl are all first-class rule targets rather than something you infer from a seed table. This matters more on BUFF Market than on most sources, because phase and price diverge hard and a phase-blind alert on Dopplers is mostly noise.

Stickers and charms. This is the section worth reading twice. BUFF Market publishes sticker and charm names in English, and prices in USD — where BUFF163 publishes the same catalogue in Chinese. If you have ever tried to write a sticker rule against a Chinese-language feed, you know the failure mode: you are string-matching a name you cannot type, for a Katowice 2014 holo whose English name you know perfectly well. On BUFF Market that problem disappears. Sticker-name rules, sticker-count rules and craft-targeting rules all work against names you can actually write. Charms carry their own pattern number here as well, so charm-pattern rules are possible on this market — a genuinely narrow capability, since a charm's pattern is the only thing separating an ordinary charm from a chased one.

What cannot fire here is anything that requires CSWatcher to act rather than observe. There is no auto-buy trigger, no bargain-offer trigger, no auto-relist. Rules on BUFF Market resolve to one of two outcomes: an alert in your feed, or nothing. That is the whole surface.

BUFF Market is watched per item, which is the single fact that should shape your watchlist here. CSWatcher asks the market about each thing you have told it to watch, so attention is a real quantity that gets divided among your rules rather than an unlimited resource. A focused list of items you would genuinely buy is watched closely; a list padded with things you were only curious about spreads the same attention thinner across all of them, including the ones that mattered. CSWatcher manages that division for you and will never respond to a long list by leaning harder on the site — it simply visits each entry less often, because a lane that gets itself blocked has failed at its only job.

The corollary is a piece of advice worth taking literally: prune. On a per-item market, deleting a rule you no longer care about is not housekeeping, it is a direct upgrade to every rule you kept. This is the opposite of how the broad-coverage lanes behave, and it is why the same watchlist should not simply be copied across all ten markets — what is free on one is expensive here.

Link precision is item-level. When a rule fires, the alert links to the specific item, not to a category page or a search you then have to re-run by hand. You land where the thing is.

Surface support: this lane is read through the free CSWatcher Bridge extension, so the request leaves from your own browser rather than from one address shared by every customer. Combined with the key-free public read described below, that means the whole BUFF Market integration is exactly as privileged as an ordinary visitor opening the site — no account, no token, nothing held on your behalf.

CSWatcher's public read of BUFF Market is key-free — there is no API key to obtain, no account to connect, no credential handed to CSWatcher. That is a deliberate property, not a limitation: the less CSWatcher holds, the less there is to lose.

CSWatcher uses one yardstick for everything. Every listing on every market — BUFF Market included — is scored against CSFloat's Final price for that item. A deal percentage therefore means the same thing no matter where the listing sits, so a 14% read on BUFF Market and a 14% read on CSFloat are directly comparable rather than two different scales wearing the same label. Fees, liquidity and settlement still differ by market and still belong in your own judgement before you buy. For the seller-fee comparison, the withdrawal and settlement differences, and a fuller breakdown of how the two sites actually diverge, see the dedicated BUFF Market vs CSFloat comparison page.

Four things, stated plainly.

BUFF Market is not BUFF163. Different site, and — importantly — a completely different item id namespace. The same physical skin carries unrelated identifiers on the two platforms. If you watch both, do not expect an id from one to resolve on the other, and do not treat a match on one as a duplicate of the other. CSWatcher keeps them as separate markets for exactly this reason.

Sorting, price filters, float filters and page 2 are login-gated. Anonymous readers do not get them. CSWatcher therefore reads the ten cheapest asks for an item and applies your rules to those ten itself, in its own engine. In practice this is fine for a BUFF Market price check or for catching a genuinely underpriced ask, because underpriced listings tend to be cheap listings and cheap listings are the ones in that window. It is not fine as a way to survey an entire order book. If the deal you want is a mid-book listing with an unusual float, an anonymous read may never see it.

Depth counts are a floor, not a total. The listing depth reported anonymously saturates around 91 listings. A count shown beside an item means "at least this many" once it approaches that ceiling — it is not the size of the book. Read it as a liquidity floor, and never as a supply figure to base a valuation on.

Both surfaces cover it. Stated again because the old caveat is still repeated: BUFF Market runs in the browser app as well as the desktop app, carried by your own browser through the free CSWatcher extension.

None of this makes BUFF Market a weak source. English sticker and charm names, USD pricing, published seeds and Doppler phases, and a key-free public read are a strong combination — it is simply an anonymous read of a partially gated site, and you should size your expectations to that.

BUFF Market scans and alerts on Spectator, the free plan, like every marketplace CSWatcher reads — so you can run the sticker-name and paint-seed rules at no cost and buy from the alert yourself. A Sniper pass is what lets CSWatcher buy on BUFF Market for you, through your own signed-in session.

Every market beyond CSFloat ships switched off. A fresh install makes zero requests to BUFF Market until you explicitly enable it and add something to watch. Nothing scans in the background, nothing pre-warms a cache, and turning the market off again stops the reads immediately. You decide what CSWatcher touches.

CSWatcher is not affiliated with or endorsed by BUFF Market.