A CS2 trading bot keeps your buy orders the highest and your offers the cheapest while you do something else. Setting one up takes a few minutes. Most of the real work is choosing good limits, so this guide spends its time there.
What you need
- A Steam account, to sign in. You never give us your Steam password.
- An account on DMarket or market.csgo.com with some balance or items.
- An API key from that marketplace. On market.csgo.com, the account's currency must be USD.
Step 1: make the API key
- DMarket: go to Settings, then Trading API, and make one key per account. Paste only the secret key: it ends with its public key, which fills itself in.
- Market.CSGO: go to the API section of your account, and make one key per account. Offers there only show while you are online in its app or browser extension, and it needs your trade link.
The key can trade on your account, so treat it like a password. We encrypt it with AES-256-GCM before saving it, and it is never shown again, not even to you. If you ever want the bot to stop for good, delete the key on the marketplace.
Step 2: connect the account
Sign in, open the robot for DMarket or the robot for market.csgo.com, and add the account with its key. The account then appears on the left of the page, with its balance and status.
Step 3: choose limits you can live with
Every offer and order has a minimum and a maximum price. The bot never goes past them, whatever competitors do. That makes them the most important thing you set.
- Selling: set the minimum to at least your break-even, which is what you paid divided by (1 minus the fee). The bot sells at your maximum if nobody competes, so set that as high as you would be happy with.
- Buying: set the maximum to the most you can pay and still profit after the fee. The bot bids your minimum when nobody else is buying, so set that as low as is realistic.
- Be careful with a wide range. It gives the bot room to win, but also room to win at a price you would not choose yourself.
Step 4: start with one item
Add one offer or one order, on a cheap item that sells often. Wait for its status to change from pending to active. Watch how the price moves when somebody competes. The free plan covers exactly this: one account, one offer and one order.
What the bot will and will not do
- It checks the market every second. When it changes a price, that price stays for 15 minutes, so the marketplace does not see a flood of updates.
- It moves back up when the cheaper offer leaves, and it does not count your own accounts as competition.
- It does not pick items for you, and it does not list a skin it bought. You decide what to buy and sell. The arbitrage tool helps you decide.
- It cannot promise profit. If the market falls, your floor stops it from selling low, but the skin may simply not sell.
Scaling up
When one item works as you expected, add more. Paid subscriptions remove our limit on offers and orders and add accounts. Marketplaces have limits of their own: both allow one account 100 orders. If you would rather work from code, the robots API does everything the page does.