About CS2TradeUp.gg: data and methodology

Updated 2026-10-11

CS2TradeUp.gg is a free, independent calculator for Counter-Strike 2 trade up contracts. It has no login, no pop-ups and no trading bots; it only computes numbers. This page explains exactly where every number on the site comes from, so you can judge how much to trust it.

Who runs this site

Ivan B., founder of CS2TradeUp.gg. I have thousands of hours in Counter-Strike and have been trading its skins for more than ten years, since the CS:GO days. For a long stretch trading was my main source of income, and I have held inventories worth over $100,000. I ran my first trade up contracts on the old CS:GO contract screen, years before CS2 existed, and I still run them now. It has not been a straight line: I have been through the ups and downs of this market, have woken up more than once to an inventory worth half of what it was the night before, and have sat through the recoveries. That experience is behind every warning on this site. I publish under my first name and initial and do not link my Steam profile; the email at the bottom of every page reaches me directly.

I write and check every guide on this site myself. The numbers, however, do not come from me: the calculator takes its prices from the public feeds listed below, and I do not sell skins, run bots or take payment for placing anything in a list. If something on the site is wrong, I want to know: see corrections.

Read: CS:GO trade up contracts 2013–2018, from someone who traded through it · The trade up guide

Item data

Skins, collections, rarities, float ranges and weapon-case contents come from the open-source CSGO-API dataset, which is generated from the game files. The site currently covers 1445 skins in 91 collections and the knife and glove pools of 43 weapon cases (522 knives and gloves). Images are served from Valve’s Steam CDN.

Prices

Prices come from public feeds of the Steam Community Market and nine marketplaces (Waxpeer, CS.MONEY, Tradeit, DMarket, White.Market, CS.TRADE, LIS-SKINS, HaloSkins, Skinport and Buff.Market), refreshed every 30 to 60 minutes. The calculator uses Steam prices by default; under the contract you can switch to the lowest marketplace listing (Waxpeer, HaloSkins, Skinport, Buff.Market or Tradeit) or to the older daily average of four markets. Skins that a market does not list fall back to the next source. Every price is an estimate: cheap inputs sell out and prices move between calculation and purchase. The site filters obviously broken data points (for example a StatTrak™ multiplier below 1 or a Battle-Scarred price far below Field-Tested) and hides contracts whose ROI exceeds 300%, which are almost always price errors. You can overwrite any price by typing your own.

Price data: every source, how each number is made and the live age of every feed →

Rules and formulas

Standard contract: 10 skins of one rarity → 1 skin of the next rarity from the collections of the inputs.
Knife contract: 5 Covert skins → 1 knife or gloves from the input’s weapon case (CS2 update of October 22, 2025). StatTrak™ inputs exclude gloves.
Souvenir skins: allowed as inputs since the May 22, 2026 update; the output is a normal skin.
Odds: (inputs from a collection ÷ number of inputs) ÷ (outcomes in that collection).
Float: output = min + average normalised input float × (max − min), where normalised = (float − skin min) ÷ (skin max − skin min).
Expected value: Σ chance × price; ROI = (EV × (1 − fee) − cost) ÷ cost; chance of profit = total chance of outcomes worth more than the cost after fee.

The profitable trade ups finder

For every collection, rarity and wear it takes the cheapest input skin that exists in that wear, fills a contract with identical copies at the middle float of the wear, prices every outcome and computes EV, ROI and chance of profit. That is ~2,100 single-collection contracts, recalculated in your browser from the daily prices. It deliberately does not search mixed-collection contracts – open any contract in the calculator to mix collections and change floats.

What we do not do

No Steam login and no trade URL. The inventory and float tools only read inventories that are already public on Steam.
No bots, no trading, no case opening.
No paid placement in any list. Marketplace links on skins may be affiliate links; they never change the numbers.

Contact and corrections

Found a wrong price, a missing skin or a rule that changed? Report item or rule errors to the upstream item data project; a single bad marketplace listing is usually gone after the next refresh (every 30 to 60 minutes). For a price that stays wrong, or a mistake in any guide, email contact@cs2tradeup.gg.

Corrections: when a reader reports an error in a guide, the page is fixed and its “Updated” date is changed; that date is the real date of the last edit, not a refresh for search engines. Rule changes from CS2 updates are added with the date of the update (for example the knife contract of October 22, 2025 and Souvenir inputs since May 22, 2026).