Do I Need Proxies for Fetching Steam Inventories at Scale?

[Emre]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently building a system that needs to fetch users' Steam inventories programmatically.

The main goal is to retrieve Steam inventory data reliably for a website/application, potentially for many different Steam accounts and with a relatively high number of requests.

I'm trying to understand whether using proxies is necessary for this kind of setup.

A few questions:

• Does Steam impose strict rate limits or IP-based restrictions when fetching public inventories?
• At approximately what request volume would proxies become necessary?
• Would rotating proxies be recommended, or would a small pool of static proxies be sufficient?
• Are datacenter proxies usually enough for Steam inventory requests, or are residential/ISP proxies required?
• What would be the most cost-effective proxy provider for this use case?
• Is there a better architecture for handling Steam inventory requests without relying heavily on proxies?

My priority is reliability and keeping the operating cost as low as reasonably possible.

I'd appreciate any advice from people who have experience dealing with Steam inventory endpoints at scale.

Thanks!