Ask three inventory calculators what your CS2 inventory is worth and you will get three different numbers. None of them is lying: each one prices your skins on a different marketplace, at a different moment, with a different idea of what "price" means.
Which price is the right one
There are three prices worth knowing for every skin:
- The lowest listing: the cheapest copy anyone is selling right now. It is what you compete with when you sell.
- The highest buy order: what someone has already promised to pay. It is what you get if you sell this minute.
- The last sale: what it actually went for, which may be hours or days old for rare items.
For valuing an inventory, the lowest listing is the most useful: it is close to what an item sells for when you list it, and it updates as fast as the market does. The Steam Community Market price is the one most people quote, but money there can only be spent on Steam, so traders who want cash look at third-party marketplaces.
The same skin, a different price on every marketplace
The same AK-47 can easily be 10–20% apart between marketplaces. Each one has its own buyers, fees and payout methods. Buff163 and Youpin are driven by the Chinese market, CSFloat by collectors who care about float and pattern, DMarket and Market.CSGO by fast traders. Our prices table shows the lowest listing of every skin on 20 marketplaces side by side, with the cheapest one highlighted.
Selling each skin where it sells best
An inventory is worth the most when every item is sold where it is priced highest, not when everything is dumped on one site. Look each item up on the prices table, which shows its lowest listing on every marketplace side by side, or pull the whole market from the price API and let a script pick the best marketplace for every item.
Things that lower what you can get
- Trade holds: items you just received cannot be moved for a while, so they cannot be sold on most marketplaces yet.
- Liquidity: a rare sticker combo may be "worth" a lot, but if nobody buys it this month, that number is a guess.
- Fees and withdrawal costs: each marketplace takes a cut, and getting money out costs something too.
- Outliers: one silly listing at ten times the price should not count. We leave out prices far from what the other marketplaces say.