backpack.tf is the leading economic resource for Team Fortress 2.

Traders trust backpack.tf to supply and decide accurate pricing information in a clear and democratic voting process.

Who are we?

backpack.tf started as a project by Steve "Brad Pitt" Rabouin in 2012 (although the site's birthday is a little difficult to pinpoint). The project has seen some large changes since then, such as the merge of stats.tf and support for other Valve titles such as Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

We have a number of moderators who put in a lot of work to keep the price guide up-to-date. If you would like to support their efforts, you can do so here.

Our infrastructure

The backpack.tf frontend runs on PHP. There are also a couple Node.js bots going around. A small Python script is used to index items to the Elasticsearch cluster.

Our servers are located in Newark, New Jersey.

Web frontend
6 cores, 16GB x2
Forums
1 core, 2GB
MongoDB
20 cores, 64GB
Elasticsearch
8 cores, 32GB x2
Bots
1 core, 1GB
Monitoring
1 core, 1GB

Press Kit

Banners

These banners are served as SVG vector images. There are plenty of free tools available if you wish to convert these to PNG or another raster format.

Just the icon

Download PSD

About item statistics on backpack.tf

Stats are gathered by parsing inventories as they are loaded on-site. We log every new item we see to Elasticsearch, and this information is used to populate data for item histories, the Premium search system, and of course detailed statistics for each item.

There are, however, some caveats to doing this:

  • We are unable to process private inventories. Items in a private inventory are considered to not exist until the inventory is made public or traded to a public inventory.
  • As of October 2014, inventory privacy has been set to Friends Only by default. Because of this, inventories of many casual users cannot be counted.
  • We will always lag behind by a few minutes. Displaying up-to-date statistics on items is an expensive process, so extensive use of caching is done to make sure we don't hit the item index too hard.
  • Some statistics such as owner count are a little fuzzy for performance reasons.

In other words, don't expect perfect statistics, as this is unfortunately impossible to guarantee.