Most CS2 skins are sold by whoever is cheapest at the moment a buyer looks. On big marketplaces that moment changes every few seconds, and the traders who win it are rarely sitting at a keyboard: they run trading bots. This guide explains what those bots do, the risks, and how to run one on DMarket and Market.CSGO.
What a CS2 trading bot does
"Trading bot" covers a few different tools. The ones worth knowing:
- Undercutting bots keep your sale offers the cheapest of their item, a step under the competition, and never under the floor price you set.
- Buy order bots keep your buy orders the highest, a step over the competition, and never over your ceiling.
- Arbitrage bots buy where an item is cheap and sell where it is priced higher. They need prices from many marketplaces at once, which is what a price API is for.
- Trade bots accept and send Steam trade offers automatically. They need your Steam login and are the riskiest kind.
Undercutting and buy order bots are the easiest place to start: they work through the marketplace's own API, never touch your Steam account, and only ever trade inside the limits you give them.
What to check before you trust a bot
- It uses the marketplace's official API key, never your password or Steam Guard codes.
- The key is stored encrypted and is never shown again, not even to you, so a leaked page or screenshot cannot give it away.
- Every offer and order has a hard minimum and maximum the bot cannot cross, whatever competitors do.
- It ignores your own other listings, so two of your accounts never undercut each other.
- It does not hammer the marketplace: changing a price every second gets keys rate limited or deleted.
DMarket bot
Our DMarket undercut bot connects with your DMarket API key. You pick items from your DMarket inventory and give each a minimum and maximum price; the bot checks the market every second and keeps your offer the cheapest of its item, or sells at your maximum when nobody competes.
For buying, it places DMarket buy orders (DMarket calls them targets) and keeps each one the highest, never over your ceiling. DMarket allows up to 100 targets per account and cannot change a target's price, so the bot replaces it with a new one at the new price.
Market.CSGO bot
The Market.CSGO undercut bot works the same way with your Market.CSGO API key: it lists items from your Steam inventory, keeps them the cheapest offer of their name, and keeps your buy orders on top. Market.CSGO changes an order's price in place and allows one order per item, up to 100 per account.
Two things specific to Market.CSGO: the account's currency must be USD, and your offers only show to buyers while you are online in Market.CSGO's app or browser extension. The bot shows a note on the account when something like that stands in the way.
How the bots price
- Prices always come live from the marketplace's API, never from a stale copy.
- When a competitor is cheaper, the offer goes one step under it; when the competitor leaves, it moves back up.
- A price the bot changed stays for 15 minutes, so neither the marketplace nor your competitors see a flood of updates. A price that is still right keeps being watched every second.
- Offers end as sold, or closed when you take an item off sale or it leaves the inventory.
Many accounts, and your own code
Each bot can run on several accounts at once, and items or accounts over your plan's limits simply pause until you upgrade. Everything you can do on the robot's page you can also do from your own scripts through the robots API, with the same key as the price API, or hand it to an AI agent.
Getting started
Sign in with Steam, open the robots page and connect a DMarket or Market.CSGO account. The free plan runs one offer and one order on one account, enough to watch it work. The Trader subscription gives each bot five accounts with as many offers and orders as the marketplace allows.