What arbitrage is, where the money actually goes after fees, and how to run your first simulated week with the noban desktop app. Written for people who have never traded a skin. No jargon, and no promises the math can't keep.
The whole strategy in one sentence: buy a skin on the market where it's cheap, sell it on the market where it's expensive, and keep the difference. The catch is that three separate costs eat into that difference, and most beginners only ever look at the first number.
The same AK-47 Redline trades on CSFloat, the Steam Community Market, Skinport, Buff163, and a half dozen other venues at the same moment. Each market has its own buyers, fees, and mood, so prices drift apart. When they drift far enough, the gap is an opportunity.
Every sale pays a fee. Steam takes a 15% cut of each sale, CSFloat takes 2%, and other venues sit in between. A spread that looks juicy before fees is often a coin flip after them. The free calculator runs the exact numbers for any trade.
Items traded through Steam sit in a 7-day trade hold before they can move again. Your capital is locked while prices keep moving. That wait has a real cost, and the app prices it into every opportunity instead of pretending the week is free.
Automating Steam Market purchases is against Steam's rules and can cost you the account. noban never automates a bannable action: it auto-buys only where automation is allowed and hands everything else to you as a manual step. That rule is enforced in code, not in a promise. Read the full safety design.
Say a skin is listed at $10.00 on CSFloat while the same skin sells for $12.50 on Steam. A 25% spread looks like free money. Here is where it actually goes. The figures below are computed live by the same fee engine the app ships with, not typed into this page.
That one trade is profitable in wallet credit and a loss in cash. Both answers are true at the same time, and knowing which one you're chasing is the difference between trading and fooling yourself.
Steam pays you in wallet credit, and wallet credit can never be withdrawn. It's real value if you were going to buy skins or games anyway. But converting it to bank-account money means selling through third-party routes that cost roughly 20% more. Venues like CSFloat pay withdrawable cash directly, which is why the app scores every opportunity both ways and its Cash Out planner routes sales toward venues that pay actual money.
These figures are computed in your browser by calc-core.mjs, the same
module our test suite pins against the app's profit engine. If the fee model changes,
this page changes with it. Want to try your own numbers?
Open the after-fee calculator.
noban is a desktop app that runs entirely on your machine. It starts in simulation by default and stays there until you deliberately change it. Here is the whole journey, in order.
Grab the Windows installer from the download section and run it. Builds are code-signed, and the trust page shows how to verify your download's hash if you want proof before you double-click.
The app opens in simulation with no account, no API keys, and no money involved. It reads live prices from keyless venues out of the box. Simulation is not a demo with fake data: it is the real trading engine paper-trading against real market prices.
Leave it running for a while. The scanner prices skins across every enabled venue and posts anything with a positive after-fee spread to the Opportunities view. On a quiet market day the list can be short. Short is honest; a radar that is always full is lying to you.
Each row is one opportunity: the skin, the venue to buy on, the venue whose price you'd sell against, and the net profit after fees and hold cost. The wear gauge shows the float value, because two copies of the same skin with different floats are different items with different prices.
Anything the bot is not allowed to automate lands in the approval queue and waits for you. In simulation you can approve or reject pretend trades to learn the rhythm. Live, this queue is the wall between the bot and any bannable action: a Steam sale or an item delivery only ever happens when you press the button.
After a few days, open Analytics. Every simulated trade is scored with the same after-fee, after-hold math as the worked example above, plus portfolio stats like drawdown. If your simulated results are negative, the market just taught you something for free. Let it.
When you start wondering about real money, open the readiness panel on the Overview. It checks the unglamorous prerequisites: a valid pro license, venue API keys, spend caps configured, kill switch tested. It is display-only by design. Completing the checklist never flips the bot live; going live takes a deliberate config change plus a valid pro license, and that guard lives in the backend, not in a button.
Free simulation does not expire, so there is no clock pushing you. Pro unlocks all eight venues, alerts, backtesting, and the tax-ready ledger; live trading requires it. If you do go live: start small, use money you can afford to leave parked through a 7-day hold, and treat your first live week as a second, more expensive simulation. See pricing for what each tier includes.
The simulation is free, runs locally, and needs no keys. If a week of paper trading doesn't convince you, it costs nothing to walk away.