Frequently asked questions

SkinAuto is a Windows desktop app that trades skins for you. It watches a market’s live price feed and buys listings that drop under your price, keeps standing buy orders on the book so you’re in line when nothing cheap is listed, and relists and reprices what you own to stay the cheapest offer.

It trades through operators — the markets you connect it to. There are two: market.csgo.com, and the Steam Market itself. Both cover CS2, Dota 2, Rust and TF2. The Steam Market is off until you explicitly turn it on, because trading there goes against Steam’s rules — see Operators.

Optionally, it can also become your Steam authenticator and accept the resulting trades for you — see Auto-confirm.

You decide what to trade, what you’ll pay, and what you won’t sell below. The app does the watching and clicking.

That depends on the market, not on the app — each operator brings its own game support.

Both markets cover CS2, Dota 2, Rust and TF2 — market.csgo.com through one API key, the Steam Market through those same four games’ sections of Steam. The app works out which game an item belongs to from the link you paste. One linked Steam authenticator covers every game on the account.

That said, CS2 is what we currently target, test and support. The other games are not fully tested and you may hit rough edges there.

Fast enough to matter. The app holds an open connection to the market’s real-time feed, so a new listing is evaluated and bought within milliseconds of appearing — the point of the whole thing, since underpriced listings are gone in seconds. If the live feed drops, it falls back to polling automatically and keeps working.

Buy orders work on the same loop: when someone outbids you, the bot re-bids a step at a time (up to your maximum) instead of waiting for you to notice.

• A Windows PC (Windows 10 or later, 64-bit) and a stable internet connection. The bot only trades while the app is running, so a machine that stays awake helps.
• An active SkinAuto subscription.
• Your Steam account. This one isn’t optional — Steam holds every item and confirms every trade, so the app signs in to Steam before it can do anything.
• Optionally, the .maFile from Steam Desktop Authenticator or CounterBot, if you use one. Importing it lets the app confirm trades straight away, with no trade hold.
• A market to trade on, and whatever it needs to act for you. For market.csgo.com that’s an account there and its API key. The Steam Market needs no key — but it does need auto-confirm linked, and it needs you to accept what trading there risks. See Operators.

See Installing the app to get started.

Only if you ask it to. Signing in to Steam — which the bot needs to keep your market account online — changes nothing about how you approve trades, and carries no trade hold.

Auto-confirm is the separate, optional step. These are escrow markets: items stay in your Steam inventory until they sell, and every trade needs a mobile confirmation within a few minutes or it fails. Without auto-confirm you tap each one on your phone. With it, the app becomes your Steam authenticator and does it for you. You don’t need Steam Desktop Authenticator — but if you already use it, or CounterBot, import its .maFile and the app takes over that same authenticator. Because the app is then your authenticator, it also shows you a live Steam Guard code so you can still sign in to Steam anywhere else.

It stops being optional if you want to trade on the Steam Market, which asks for a confirmation on every single order and listing rather than only on the finished trade.

Worth knowing before you switch it on: linking a new authenticator costs a one-time Steam trade hold (importing a .maFile doesn’t), and automating confirmations is against the Steam Subscriber Agreement — your account, your risk. The app says so on the consent screen. Full detail in Auto-confirm & trade confirmations.

Two things make it defensible:

• Your secrets never leave your machine. The market API key and the Steam authenticator secrets are encrypted on your own device, per account. We never receive them, and there’s no server-side copy.
• It never blind-confirms. Before confirming anything, the app cross-checks the pending Steam confirmation against the market’s own list of trades it created. Only a match is confirmed automatically. A confirmation the market didn’t originate — a phishing offer, an account-recovery prompt, a stray trade — is never auto-approved; it’s held and surfaced for you to decide.

One honest exception: trading on the Steam Market is the risky option here, and not because of how the app stores anything. Steam’s Subscriber Agreement prohibits automated trading. That market is off by default, takes an explicit acceptance to switch on, and is the only part of the app that puts your Steam account itself on the line — see Operators.

As with any account, keep your device secure, and save the backups the app asks you to save at link time. See Auto-confirm & trade confirmations.

Yes, and it ships switched off — which tells you most of what you need to know.

Steam doesn’t allow automated trading — its Subscriber Agreement prohibits it, and the account at risk is your main one, the same one holding every skin you own. Valve can suspend your Market access or your trading, temporarily or permanently, and nobody can appeal that for you.

So it stays off until you open Operators, read what you are agreeing to, and switch it on yourself. Nothing else in the app turns it on, and signing in to Steam certainly doesn’t.

If you do turn it on, three things behave differently from market.csgo.com:

• Auto-confirm is required, not optional. Steam asks for a mobile confirmation for every buy order and every listing, so without the app as your authenticator it simply won’t place them.
• There’s no live feed. Steam publishes nobody else’s listings, so the bot polls instead of watching — a good listing is found in seconds rather than milliseconds.
• Anything you buy there is locked for 7 days — not sellable, not tradable. That’s Steam’s rule for Market purchases, and it makes the Steam Market a hold-and-sell venue rather than a flipping one.

Full detail in Operators.

Only if you switch on auto-confirm. Simply signing the app in to Steam carries no hold.

Auto-confirm does, because Steam attaches its trade hold to the authenticator secret rather than the device: adding a new authenticator means Steam holds your trades for up to 15 days, clearing after the authenticator has been active for 7 days. Any new authenticator does this — a new phone would too.

Already using Steam Desktop Authenticator or CounterBot? Then there’s no hold. Import your .maFile instead of linking, and the app takes over the authenticator your account already has — the same secret, so Steam sees nothing new. See Coming from CounterBot or SDA.

The app warns you before you commit, then makes you save two backups: an encrypted secret bundle and your revocation code. Keep the bundle and moving to a new PC is an import, not a re-link — same secret, so no new hold. See Auto-confirm & trade confirmations.

Yes, and you should. Import your .maFile and the app takes over the authenticator your account already has. Steam sees nothing new, so there is no trade hold and nothing to re-link — you can switch from CounterBot and keep selling the same day.

Sign in to Steam in the app as usual, then choose Import .maFile instead where it offers auto-confirm. Encrypted SDA folders work too: also pick manifest.json from the same folder and enter your SDA passphrase.

The import happens once. After that the app is your authenticator and doesn’t need the file again — save this app’s own backup, then turn off auto-confirm in SDA or CounterBot so the two don’t both approve trades. Step by step: Coming from CounterBot or SDA.

Yes — a valid subscription unlocks trading in the app. You can activate, view, and manage it from your account page in the browser. If trading is ever locked, an inactive or expired subscription is the most common reason. See Subscription & billing.

You pay in cryptocurrency. Open the Subscription section of your account page, pick a plan, and you’ll be taken to a secure payment page to pay with USDT on BNB Smart Chain (BEP-20) — a US-dollar stablecoin, so the amount stays exactly the price shown. Send it on that network only: USDT sent on another network (such as TRC-20 or ERC-20) doesn’t reach the payment. Once the payment confirms on-chain (usually a few minutes) your subscription activates automatically, and the app unlocks trading the next time it checks.

Prices are listed in US dollars and paid in the equivalent USDT. BEP-20 network fees are a few cents, and most exchanges and wallets can send on it. We use crypto rather than cards because it settles reliably for our region and audience.

No. Each purchase is a one-time extension — there’s no card on file and nothing is ever charged automatically (crypto payments can’t pull funds from your wallet). As your subscription nears its end the app reminds you, and you renew from your account page whenever you’re ready. You can renew early — within the last 7 days before it expires — so there’s no gap in access.

No — all payments are final. Crypto payments can’t be reversed or charged back the way a card payment can, so once a subscription is paid and activated there’s no mechanism to undo it. Please be sure before you buy.

What keeps that low-risk is that only the 1-month plan is on sale, so the most you can commit to at once is one month.

If something actually went wrong — you paid and your subscription didn’t activate, or you were charged twice — that isn’t a refund question, it’s a mistake to fix. Contact support from your account page with the payment details and we’ll sort it out.

The 1-month plan is the only one we sell right now. SkinAuto is still in its testing stage, so the price is intentionally low while we finish hardening things — and it will go up once testing wraps. Locking you into a longer term at a price that’s about to change isn’t fair to either side, so longer plans aren’t on sale yet. Once pricing settles we’ll add them, and they’ll appear on your account page automatically.

Yes. Install the app on the new machine and sign in with the same account — your subscription follows your account. Then import the encrypted secret bundle you exported when you linked the authenticator: that restores the same Steam secret, so there’s no re-link and no new trade hold. You’ll set your market up again in Operators — for market.csgo.com that’s pasting its API key once more, and for the Steam Market it’s accepting its terms again, since that acceptance is stored on the device rather than on your account.

Your subscription is licensed to one computer at a time, so moving it to the new machine stops the one you left. You can move it twice in any 7 days. After that the app tells you the date your allowance resets, and until then the licence stays on the machine that has it — that machine goes on trading as normal, and your subscription is unaffected either way.

The backup carries every profile’s buy and sell lists too. To copy just one list — to another profile, or to someone else — use Export / Import on the Buying or Selling page instead; see Setting up buying & selling.

Use the backup rather than copying the app’s data folder across. Saved keys are encrypted for the computer that saved them, so a copied folder will make you sign in and paste your market keys again. A backup also can’t be imported onto a computer where another profile already holds the same Steam account: delete that profile first.

If you lost the bundle, you can still recover with your revocation code — but re-linking mints a new secret and starts a fresh hold. See Auto-confirm & trade confirmations.

Absolutely. Buying and selling have their own stop controls in the app — hit either and new activity halts immediately, while anything already in flight is left in a safe state. Closing the app stops everything too, since the bot only trades while it’s running.

If you turned on auto-confirm, you can unlink the authenticator separately, which hands trade approvals back to you without touching your buy and sell lists.

Yes. Windows shows that warning for any installer that isn’t code-signed yet and hasn’t been downloaded by many people, which is where SkinAuto is today. Click More info → Run anyway to install.

Only download SkinAuto from the download page on this site. Updates after that come from inside the app, so you’ll only see the warning once.