The money that is at PSA
Ask the internet what PSA costs and you get a fee table. Half a dozen sites keep one, they do not entirely agree with each other, and PSA moved its prices in February. All of them answer the same question: what is the number on the invoice.
That is the smallest part of the problem. The fee is paid once, in one month, for cards that will not come back for weeks or months and cannot be sold while they are gone. Where that money sits in the meantime, and which card is carrying it when the box comes back, is what decides whether the margin on a graded sale is real. Nobody writes that part down, so here it is.
This guide quotes no fees on purpose. The tiers and prices are on PSA's own site and they move; what is below does not.
In this guide
1. The fee is the part everyone quotes
The per-card tier price is real and it is not what a submission costs you. Around it sit the things that never appear in a fee table:
- Shipping out, with tracking and insurance, because you are mailing away something worth more than the postage.
- Shipping back, which PSA charges you for and which lands months after you have stopped thinking about the cost.
- Insurance on the declared value, both directions.
- Packaging and supplies — sleeves, semi-rigids, a box that will survive a courier.
- Membership, if the tier you used requires one. It is an annual cost and it belongs to every submission you make that year, not just the first.
The important thing about that list is not that it adds up. It is that most of it is per-batch, not per-card. One box costs roughly one box's worth of shipping whether there are four cards in it or forty.
Which means the same card costs a different amount to grade depending on what it travelled with. A card sent alone carries the whole of the shipping, the insurance and the packaging. The same card in a submission of thirty carries a thirtieth of them.
So “what does grading cost” has no answer at the card level until you know the batch. This is also the entire argument for waiting until you have enough cards to justify a box.
2. Where that money lives while the cards are gone
Between the day the box ships and the day it comes back, those cards are in an unusual state: not in your case, not sellable, not yet an expense, and no longer cash. Most ways of keeping books have no column for that, so the money simply drops out of view.
The visible symptom is a weekend that reads worse than it felt. You paid for a submission on the Tuesday, worked a show on the Saturday, and the month looks thin for a reason that is not written anywhere near the show.
There are two usual ways to lose it, and they end in the same place:
- Expensed on the day you paid. The submission becomes a line in a costs bucket alongside the table fee and the parking. Months later the graded cards sell, and each one shows a margin calculated against what you paid for it raw — which is to say, too high.
- Forgotten entirely. Same outcome by a shorter route. The card's cost is what you paid at the table and the grading simply never happened, as far as the books know.
Both make every graded sale look better than it was. It is the same failure the consignment guide describes from the other end: a card recorded as costing less than it cost, reporting a margin that was never there.
3. The grading cost belongs on the card
This is the whole thing, and it is one sentence: a grading fee is not an operating cost, it is money spent on one specific card.
A table fee buys you a weekend. Parking buys you a day. A grading fee buys you a different object — the same card, in a slab, with a number on it, worth a different amount. That makes it part of what the card cost you, and it goes on the card.
| Worked through, with made-up numbers | Amount |
|---|---|
| Paid for the card raw | $40 |
| Its share of the submission (fee + its slice of the per-batch costs) | $38 |
| What the card cost you | $78 |
| Sells for | $150 |
| Margin | $72, not $110 |
The $38 does not stop existing because it was paid three months earlier and sits in a different month's bank statement. If it is not on the card, it is in a bucket where it will be quietly subtracted from a month that had nothing to do with it, and the $110 is the number you will use to decide what to buy next.
Note that it is a share, not the fee. Per-card fee plus that card's slice of everything from section 1 that was per-batch. Divide the batch costs by the number of cards in the box and add.
4. What to write down before the box ships
Before, not after — because once it has gone, the only record is a form on PSA's site, and that form does not know what you paid for anything.
| Record | Why |
|---|---|
| Which cards | Specifically enough to tell two copies apart. The submission form has them; your own books should too. |
| What each cost you raw | You know it today. In four months you will be reconstructing it from a bank line, if at all. |
| Tier and per-card fee | The part a fee table would have told you. |
| The per-batch costs, and how many cards | Both halves. The costs alone are not a per-card share until there is a divisor beside them. |
| Declared value per card | It is what insurance pays if the box does not arrive, and it is the number you will want when deciding whether this was worth doing. |
| Date shipped | Section 6. Without it, a submission that has stalled looks exactly like one that is progressing. |
5. Three ways the box comes back
Return shipping is a per-batch cost that happens at the end, so the share from section 3 is not final until the cards are home. Add it, then deal with what actually arrived.
- The grade you wanted. The straightforward one. Basis is raw plus share, the card goes in the case at a price worked out against that number, and the submission paid for itself or did not.
- A grade below what you hoped. The cost does not shrink to match the disappointment. A nine you sent as a probable ten is a card that cost you the raw price plus the full share, and pricing it as though the grading never happened is how a loss gets hidden rather than learned from. This is the case people quietly drop, and it is the one with the most to teach about your own eye for a card.
- Not gradeable at all. Altered, trimmed, evidence of restoration, or any other no-grade outcome. You still paid. There is no slab to carry the cost, so record it as a loss on that card rather than spreading it across the rest of the batch — spreading it makes the other cards look worse than they were and makes the failure itself invisible, which is the wrong half of the lesson to keep.
6. The question you cannot answer from memory
What is at PSA right now, and how much of my money is in it?
One submission, you can hold in your head. Two or three overlapping ones and nobody can, and the answer matters in three ordinary situations:
- Before booking a table — knowing what is likely to be back in time to sell changes what the weekend is worth.
- At a buy — so you do not pay for a card you already own, in a box, in Nevada.
- Before the next submission — the cash is already committed, and committing more without seeing the first amount is how a slow month becomes a tight one.
A list with six columns covers it: card, which submission, date shipped, declared value, cost so far, status. A spreadsheet is entirely adequate.
Clody does not keep this list for you. It holds the grading cost on the card, which is section 3, and that part is genuinely handled — but there is no submission tracking in it today. If you grade regularly, that spreadsheet is yours to keep, and we would rather say so than let you find out in four months.
The thing the list catches that nothing else does: a submission that has been out well past its stated turnaround. Nobody notices a slow one if nothing is counting the days.
7. When the arithmetic says do not grade
Grading is sold as upside and it is a bet with a fee attached. The honest version of the sum uses the loaded cost from section 3, not the sticker fee, and it uses the grade you are most likely to get rather than the one you are picturing.
A card worth $60 raw, $150 in a ten and $70 in a nine is not a $90 opportunity. It is a bet that pays $90 some of the time and about $10 the rest of the time, minus a loaded cost in both cases — and calling which, reliably, from a card in your hand, is a skill most people believe they have more of than they do.
- Bulk tiers do not rescue cheap cards. The per-card fee drops, the per-batch costs do not, and a box of low-value cards can cost more to send than the grades are worth.
- Turnaround is part of the price. Money in a box in another country is money not buying stock for the next three shows.
- The sure thing is the raw sale. Selling it today at a known price is a real option and deserves to be compared against, not treated as the thing you do when you give up.
A usable rule: grade when the loaded cost is a small fraction of the raw value, and when you would be content owning the card at the grade you expect rather than the grade you want.
Where the software comes in
Most of the above is a method and a spreadsheet. One part of it is a number that has to live somewhere permanent, and that is the part this product does:
Clody keeps a card's grading cost as its own figure beside what you paid for it raw, and adds the two together wherever a cost is needed — so the margin on a graded sale, the value of your stock and the profit on a show are all worked out against what the card really cost. That is section 3, in the place it has to be for the number to still be right in four months.
What it does not do is section 6, and that is worth repeating here rather than burying it above: there is no submission tracking in Clody today. Keep that list yourself.
Free to start, with 14 days of Pro on the house. The method is yours either way — a dealer who puts the grading fee on the card beats one with a subscription who leaves it in a bucket.
Next: card shows in Metro Vancouver — where the cards go once they are back from the grader, with dates, venues and table counts.