afk.tf

How much does a TF2 trading bot cost?

Both answers: what renting costs, and what running your own actually costs.

The short version. Renting one here is 2 Mann Co. Supply Crate Keys per month. Running your own costs nothing in keys and somewhere between a few dollars a month and a permanently noisy PC in everything else. Which is cheaper depends on what your time is worth and whether you already have a machine that never sleeps.

What renting costs

Two keys a month, per bot. No percentage of what it makes, nothing per trade, and no minimum term — the full list of what that includes is on the rent page, but the short form is a bot that is already online, already past the Steam trade hold, already on backpack.tf with its full listing cap, and already priced against the live order book.

The price is in keys rather than money on purpose: your inventory is denominated in keys, your profit is in keys, and so the rent moves with the same thing your earnings do.

What running your own costs

People say the software is free, and it is. That is also not where the money goes.

Somewhere for it to run

A bot is only earning while the process is up. That means either a machine of your own left on permanently — a small always-on PC is real electricity over a year, plus the wear on it — or a rented server, which for something that can comfortably run one bot is usually a few dollars a month. Both are cheap in isolation. Neither is free, and the rented-server option is the one people forget to count when they say "it costs nothing".

Your time, which is the big one

Steam sessions drop. Game updates change things. Rate limits appear under load. Mobile confirmations have to be handled on every single trade. None of that is hard, and all of it arrives at inconvenient hours, and every hour the bot is down is an hour your items are locked up earning nothing. This is the actual cost of running your own, and it is the one that does not show up on any invoice.

The account itself

The Steam account is free to make, but a brand new one cannot trade for fifteen days — Steam's hold on accounts without an established mobile authenticator. That is two weeks of owning a bot that cannot do anything, and it is a real cost even though nobody charges you for it. A rented bot is already past it.

backpack.tf premium

Not required, but it sets how many items the bot can advertise at once, and listings are how a bot finds trades at all. A non-premium account is capped low enough that the cap, rather than your inventory, becomes the thing limiting what it earns. Premium is bought with keys or a donation; bots rented here already have it.

The figure that actually decides it

Neither number above tells you whether to do this. The one that does is how much margin your inventory can turn over in a month.

At two keys of rent, the bot has to clear two keys of profit to break even — about the margin on a handful of ordinary item trades. If your stock would comfortably do that, the rent is noise and the decision is easy. If it would not, no hosting arrangement saves you, because the problem is not the cost; it is that there is not enough trade to cover any cost.

That question is worked through properly on are TF2 trading bots worth it, including the inventory size where the maths starts to work.

Renting versus hosting it yourself

Run your own if you already have a machine on permanently, you enjoy the infrastructure side, and an outage at 3am is an interesting problem rather than an annoyance. It is genuinely the cheaper option in keys and you will learn more.

Rent if you want the trading and not the sysadmin. You are paying a flat two keys to make uptime, restarts, confirmations, rate limits and the fifteen-day trade hold somebody else's problem, and to skip the part where you find out which of those matter by losing money to them.

What it does not cost

Rent a bot