Key takeaways
- The decision is a subtraction, not an intuition: graded price at the grade you actually receive, minus the fee, minus postage both ways, minus insurance, minus any selling fees, compared with the raw price.
- The grade is an unknown when you submit, so the sum has to be run at a grade you would be disappointed by, not the one you are hoping for.
- Published grading fees start well above zero — the lowest per-card fees we found on PSA's and CGC's own pricing pages on 15 September 2026 were $59.99 and $17 respectively, before any postage.
- Turnaround is a cost too: both companies state in writing that their published turnaround times are estimates only and not guaranteed.
- Our app supplies two of the inputs — an identified printing variant and a centring measurement — and deliberately supplies neither a grade nor a prediction of one.
Grading is worth it when the graded price, at the grade you actually receive, minus the fee, minus postage both ways, minus insurance, minus the selling fee on the eventual sale, is comfortably more than what the card sells for raw. That is the entire decision. It is a subtraction, and most of the disappointment in this hobby comes from people running it in their heads with optimistic numbers instead of on paper with realistic ones.
This page is about how to fill in each term honestly, and about which of them nobody — including us — can give you.
Published by Reign Creative LLC. Fee and turnaround details below were last verified on 15 September 2026.
How this was researched
We publish a card scanning app, so this is not a neutral piece of consumer advice and you should weigh it accordingly. Every figure attributed to a grading company was read on 15 September 2026 from that company's own published pricing page, linked in the sources at the end. We have not been given information by any grading company, we are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them, and all names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. We deliberately do not quote what any specific card sells for, graded or raw, because those figures move constantly and a stale number in an article is worse than no number.
We also checked a third grading company's site on the same day and found it serving a maintenance page rather than its published fees. Rather than describe its tiers from memory, we have left it out.
The five terms of the sum
1. The raw price. What the card sells for in its current condition, on the marketplace you would actually list it on, at a price that has recently completed rather than one someone is asking for. Asking prices are aspirations.
2. The graded price at a realistic grade. Not the top of the scale. The grade you would shrug at. This is the term people inflate, and it is the one the whole decision hinges on.
3. The grading fee. Published per card, and tied to how much the card is insured for and how quickly you want it back. On 15 September 2026, the lowest per-card figure on PSA's published pricing page was $59.99 under its Standard service level, with a maximum insured value of $1,000 and an estimated turnaround of 90–100 business days. CGC's published fee chart on the same day showed a Bulk tier at $17 per card with a $500 maximum value per card, a 25-card minimum and a 150-working-day estimate, and an Economy tier at $20 per card with a $1,000 maximum value and a 90-working-day estimate.
4. Postage, insurance and packaging. In both directions. Charged per parcel, not per card, which is the single biggest reason submitting one card at a time is expensive.
5. The selling fee. Whatever the marketplace takes when the graded card eventually sells.
Run those five and you have an answer. Run three of them and you have a feeling.
The term that is genuinely unknowable
The grade.
There is no way to know it in advance. You can measure centring precisely — that part is arithmetic, and how to measure card centring sets out the method — but centring is one input among surface, corners and edges, assessed by a grader under controlled conditions against published standards.
Two practical consequences follow.
Run the sum at a grade you would be mildly disappointed by. If it still works, the decision is sound. If it only works at the very top of the scale, you are not evaluating a card, you are buying an outcome you cannot price.
Treat time as committed, not lent. Both companies publish turnaround estimates and both state plainly that they are estimates only and not guaranteed — PSA adds that turnaround times may change rapidly without notice as conditions change, and that terms and conditions are subject to change. On the day we checked, PSA's pricing page was additionally showing that its Value service levels were temporarily paused. A queue is not a fixed cost, and availability is not permanent.
What supplies each input
| Input the decision needs | TCG Card Grading Scanner Value | A professional grading service | Verification source | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Which card and which printing you are holding | Identifies it and shows ranked alternatives; you confirm the variant | Identifies it as part of the grading process | Reign Creative app listing | 15 September 2026 |
| A market-value estimate for that variant | Yes, from available third-party market information; not a guaranteed sale price, offer or appraisal | Not provided as part of grading | Reign Creative app listing | 15 September 2026 |
| Centring measurement | Measures left, right, top and bottom borders from front and back photographs | Assesses centring as one grading criterion | Reign Creative app listing | 15 September 2026 |
| An official grade | No — explicitly informational only | Yes, this is the service | Reign Creative app listing; PSA published grading standards | 15 September 2026 |
| Published fee by declared value and turnaround | No | Yes, published per service level | PSA pricing page; CGC services and fees | 15 September 2026 |
| What a graded copy would sell for | No | No | Reign Creative app listing | 15 September 2026 |
The bottom row is the important one and it is empty on both sides. Neither an app nor a grading company tells you what the graded card will fetch. That number has to come from completed sales you look up yourself, and it is the term most likely to be wrong in your head.
Why our app stops where it does
TCG Card Grading Scanner Value does three things for this decision: it identifies the card, it prices the specific printing variant separately rather than averaging normal, holo and reverse holo together, and it measures centring from your photographs.
It does not assign a grade. It does not predict a grade. It does not estimate a grading fee.
That is a deliberate boundary and it costs us something — "we will tell you what grade this will get" is a far better pitch than "we will measure one criterion and show you the number". We are not going to build it, for a reason that is easy to state: a predicted grade from a phone photograph, taken in unknown lighting at an unknown angle, would be wrong often enough that acting on it would cost people real money in fees. The app says so directly: grading estimates are informational only, lighting, glare, camera angle, card design and manual alignment all affect the measurement, and an official grade requires an independent professional grading service.
The value estimates carry a similar caveat and it is worth repeating here rather than burying it. They are estimates based on available third-party market information for the matched card and variant, pricing can change and may be unavailable for some cards, and they are not guaranteed sale prices, offers or appraisals.
A shortlist of cases where the answer is usually no
Not rules, but the situations where the sum tends to fail before you run it.
- A single low-value card. Per-parcel postage and insurance do not care what is inside the envelope.
- A card you have not identified precisely. Variants price separately, and grading the wrong assumption is expensive — reverse holo versus holo explains why that distinction is not cosmetic.
- A card with visible edge or corner wear. Condition caps the achievable grade, and the ceiling is where the arithmetic lives. What the condition scales actually mean is the relevant reading.
- A card you intend to keep. Grading protects and authenticates, which are real benefits, but the break-even sum above is about selling. If you are not selling, judge it on those other grounds instead.
- Anything where you cannot find recent completed sales at both raw and graded. With two of the five terms missing, there is nothing to calculate.
The one thing to do before anything else
Look up the fee structure yourself, on the grading company's own site, on the day you are deciding. Not a summary, not a forum post, not this article in six months. Fees, service levels and availability all change, and the published page is the only version that is current. The structure of those tiers and what each one buys is laid out in what card grading costs and what the tiers buy you.
Then run the subtraction with a grade you would be disappointed by. If it still works, you have a decision rather than a hope.
Our scanner sits with the rest of the studio's practical Android tools under Video & Utility Apps.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
How do you work out whether grading is worth it?
What if I do not know what grade it will get?
What costs do people forget?
Are cheap cards worth grading?
Does the app tell me whether to grade something?
Sources
- Card Authentication & Grading Prices (opens in a new tab)Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) — accessed
- CGC Cards Services and Fees (opens in a new tab)CGC Cards — accessed
About the author
Reign Creative LLC — The independent app studio that builds the apps covered on this site and publishes every article here. On Google Play it publishes as Reign Collective Apps.
We use AI tools to help research, draft and edit our articles. Each article lists the sources its factual claims rely on, and details about our apps come from their live Google Play listings. No article on this site has been reviewed by an independent expert unless the reviewer is named on it.
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