How ForceBuy works

ForceBuy keeps a ledger of your CS2 items: what you own, what each item cost, what it is worth today and what you made on the items you sold. This page explains where each of those numbers comes from and what ForceBuy does not do.

1. You sign in with Steam

Signing in goes through Steam's own sign-in page. Steam tells ForceBuy which account you own, as a SteamID64, and nothing else. ForceBuy never sees your password.

ForceBuy on the web is in a closed test. After signing in you see whether your account is part of it. The demo shows the whole app with invented items and needs no account.

2. ForceBuy reads your inventory

Without anything else stored, ForceBuy reads the public view of your CS2 inventory. That needs your inventory to be public, and Steam leaves storage units and recently traded items out of that view.

With your Steam session stored, ForceBuy reads the inventory the way you see it yourself: also a private inventory, and the items inside your storage units. Every item keeps its float and pattern, the stickers applied to it and, for Dopplers, its phase.

3. ForceBuy reads what you paid

The purchase price is not part of the inventory. It is in the history of the place where you bought:

Steam Community Market: your market history lists every purchase and sale with its price. Steam shows it only to a signed-in session, so ForceBuy needs your Steam session to read it.
Steam inventory history: every movement of an item with date and time: trades, case openings, market purchases and sales, storage units. It has no prices, but it tells where an item came from. It also needs the session.
CSFloat: your trades, read with an API key you create on your CSFloat profile under Developer.
Buff163: your purchases and sales, read with your Buff163 session.

Each of these is optional. Without them ForceBuy still shows what you own and what it is worth, and you can enter costs by hand or import them as CSV.

4. Each purchase is tied to its item

A purchase is matched to the exact copy in your inventory, not only to an item name. Most rows in Steam's histories carry the asset ID of the item, so the match is exact. Where no ID is available, ForceBuy picks the copy by its other properties and marks the match "Ambiguous", so you can check it.

Items that have no purchase anywhere, such as drops and trades, get a cost by hand or from a cost rule, for example "drops cost nothing". A cost from a rule is marked "rule", so it is never mistaken for a price someone paid.

Stickers, patches, charms and name tags you put onto an item count in its cost with what they cost you, not their market price: the item shows its own price and each thing on it separately. A charm taken off leaves the cost again. Each kind can be turned off in the settings.

5. Prices and value

ForceBuy collects prices for the whole CS2 catalogue several times a day from the Steam Community Market, CSFloat, Buff163, YouPin898, Skinport and C5Game. You choose which marketplace's price counts as the value of your items.

Every value is shown as the price a buyer pays, with what you would keep after that marketplace's fee below it. Realised profit is what a sale left you after the fee, minus what the item cost. Amounts are converted into your currency with the reference rates of the European Central Bank.

6. When ForceBuy reads

ForceBuy reads your accounts once a day by itself and whenever you start a sync, with a short wait between two manual syncs. A Steam session ends after about a day. If you store Steam's renewal token, ForceBuy fetches a new session about once a day by itself; otherwise you paste a new one by hand. The most convenient way to hand over the token is the browser extension ForceBuy Connect for Chrome, Edge and Firefox, which sends it after every new Steam sign-in in that browser. Until a session is there, ForceBuy reads your public inventory, and the next session catches up on the history in between. Nothing collected before is lost.

7. What ForceBuy never does

ForceBuy only reads. Every request it sends to Steam, CSFloat, Buff163 or any other marketplace is a GET request. It never lists, buys, sells, trades or accepts an offer.

A stored Steam or Buff163 session (or Steam's renewal token, which works for months) is still a full session of that site, and storing it in a third-party tool goes against that site's terms. This holds just the same when the browser extension hands it over, and the window can be longer, because new tokens follow by themselves. Read the FAQbefore you store one. The public inventory needs no session at all.

On your own computer

The local app for Windows does the same, with your data, keys and Steam session in one folder on your PC.