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CS Armoury

How CS Armoury works

CS Armoury tracks every tradable Counter-Strike 2 item and compares its price across marketplaces. This page explains where the numbers come from and how each metric is calculated, so you can judge how much weight to give them.

Item data

The catalogue is built straight from the game: the item schema and English text are read out of the CS2 installation's VPK archives (currently build 1.41.9.0), and item images are decoded from the game's own textures. That covers weapon skins with every exterior, StatTrak™ and Souvenir variant and Doppler phase, knives, gloves, stickers, patches, graffiti in every colour, charms and sticker slabs, agents, music kits, cases, capsules, souvenir packages, keys, pins and passes.

A few facts aren't in the client files. Knife and glove pools per case and some release dates come from the community CSGO-API dataset. The catalogue is checked against the names every marketplace lists and matches 99.99% of them. Last rebuilt 14 Oct 2026.

Prices

Prices are collected from these markets every 30 minutes to 2 hours. Steam answers only a few searches an hour, so its market is read a slice at a time and takes about 30 hours to cover:

BUFF163, YouPin898, C5GAME, CS.MONEY, LOOT.FARM and Swap.gg prices are read from the public csgotrader.app price mirrors, which update a few times a day. Doppler and Gamma Doppler phases are priced separately wherever a market distinguishes them.

Reference price

The reference price comes from the lowest asks on the main cash markets (BUFF163, YouPin, C5GAME, CSFloat, Skinport, Market.CSGO, LIS-SKINS, Waxpeer and DMarket), counting only markets with at least one listing. Steam is left out because its 15% fee and wallet-only proceeds keep its prices well above cash markets; bot stores are left out because their prices include the bot's margin.

Thinly traded items often carry placeholder asks, such as a ¥99,999 listing on a $600 skin, so a plain median of two or three markets can't be trusted. We group asks that agree with each other (each within twice the group's cheapest ask) and take the median of the cheapest group. A group with at least two more markets outvotes it, so one stale low listing can't drag the price down; when the cheapest group is a single market, recent sale prices decide. The result is also capped at 1.5 times the Steam ask, since nobody pays a cash market far more than Steam charges. On liquid items, where every market agrees, this is simply the median.

Trends and history

We record the reference price and each major market's lowest ask every day. For containers, stickers, agents and charms, daily CSFloat sale records go back to 2023. Skin sale averages from CSFloat are not used, because they mix floats, patterns and applied stickers.

Changes compare today with the same series a week, month or year ago. Until an item has enough tracked history, the weekly and monthly figures are estimated from rolling sale averages (last 7 days against the last 30, last 30 against the last 90) and marked with an asterisk. All-time highs and lows use the longest history held for the item.

Indices

Each index holds a category's most liquid items with equal weights and chains their daily log returns from a base of 1,000. Items join 30 days after release so the usual post-launch slide doesn't dominate, and a single day's move is capped at 40%. Back-filled sale series are smoothed with a five-day median. A day's value is final once the next day ends: when items join or leave an index, or older sale history comes in, the change counts from then on and past values stay as they were.

Liquidity and spread

The liquidity score (0 to 100) blends daily sales, active listings across all markets and the number of markets carrying the item, each on a log scale. The bid-ask spread is the median gap between each cash market's lowest ask and its highest buy order.

Case odds

Case economics use Valve's published odds: each rarity tier is five times rarer than the one below, and a knife or gloves drops 0.26% of the time. Floats follow the standard wear distribution (a wear band is picked with 3/24/33/24/16% odds, then mapped onto the finish's float range), and weapon cases roll StatTrak™ one time in ten. Expected value uses reference prices; the cost to open adds a $2.49 key where one is needed. Terminals and other containers with variable unlock prices show an expected value but no return figure.

Display settings

Price change colours

How we make money

CS Armoury is free to use. It pays for itself two ways. Some links to marketplaces are affiliate links: if you buy through one, the marketplace may pay us a commission, at no extra cost to you. Ad spaces, clearly labelled, may also show ads from an ad network.

Neither affects the numbers. Reference prices, rankings, the cheapest-market badge and which marketplaces we list are computed the same way whether or not a market pays us, and ads never sit inside price tables. The privacy policy explains the cookies involved.

Not affiliated with Valve Corporation. Prices are informational and not financial advice; always confirm a listing on the marketplace before trading.