PSA basically opened up little by little by having lotteries. You had to be selected to be able to submit at a tier they opened up. I cant remember the exact prices, but I think the first tier they opened back up was around $50 . They eventually did this with lower value tiers until they got it under control and opened Bulk up to $18.
I probably have the specific numbers wrong, but that’s pretty much how it went. Wild times lol
And when PSA finally fully opened up, the market was cooling off significantly in 2022. Since this all happened, I believe the lowest price they ever did was a $13.99 special (If I recall correctly). Prior to the shutdown it was cheaper to grade. In short, I wouldn’t be surprised if grading bulk stayed above $20 moving forward.
I don’t quite follow how lowering the supply of graded slabs will lower prices? It s just makes it less likely for the average person to want to grade the hits they pulled.
Frankly, making it so that low end submissions are more expensive will just make the new population of slabs getting created be dominated by entities that don’t really mind the loss of value proposition for lower end cards. To me, that’s all the online mystery bag companies that are also going on million dollar shopping sprees at every major card shows buying every bulk slab brought to them. They won’t mind having to pay more to get an IR card graded because once they make the slab a floor in their gamba game, the value to them automatically increases dramatically at scale in a way no individual grifter/collector could ever hope for.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how this helps collectors out in the end at all. At best it just seems like a way that PSA can get away with not increasing their labor workforce (i.e cost) to handle demand and at worst it seems like it’s just more collusion between PSA and these gamba companies that they have been partnering with recently.
I think they did a $12.99 TCG special just once, otherwise they pretty regularly offered $13.99 for TCG
I would have to do some digging but I do recall prices decreased but never reached pre-covid levels and gradually increased in the following years.
We had it so good!
Price of submitting, not the second hand market value for cards
I majorly regret not sending more of my backlog then, thinking at that point it might go even lower to $10 a card.
In hindsight, no matter what your quantity is to send, it’s not worth holding out for only $3/card savings as that extra $3 has been more than made up with the market increases, and also they were more fair grading back then and upcharges were few and far between…
Agreed!
Saw a video recently that had 2 attorney have a discussion about the upcharges and how one could legally fight it. Pretty interesting stuff from Boston Card Hunter who’s on a mission to take down PSA lol
Damn right it is! Rather than leave well enough alone with a card in a binder or displayed in a card stand, we manufacture a bubble mailer, print a label, use fuel to ship to PSA, people drive their car to work to encase a card in plastic that was sourced from China, then its put in a cardboard box that was once a tree, then use fuel again to ship back to you. All for 1 card to be graded.
Yeah, its messed up.
Maybe the real graded cards were the friends we made along the way
I help companies do this for a living haha.
I would LOVE to get under the skin of PSA’s planning team and look at their models.
So many factors come onto play + especially ok companies that have high levels of churn with low level employees like I’m suuuuuure PSA will have with how busy they are.
I might make some models for a laugh.
Please keep this thread on topic, that topic being about PSA/grading updates, not the environment.
If 700 per day is in the ballpark, my concern would be with the risk of cards getting damaged just from the speed at which they are handled. But maybe they have the steady hands and technology to pull it off. I would be fumbling, squeezing too hard, or dropping cards all over the place at that speed.
Just don’t look too hard and slap a 9 on everything.
The average person should not even be grading the hits they pull. These are not rare cards. The grading fee itself costs more than most cards in a set.
What collectors need to do is stop being influenced by scum social media influencers. Why do they need their cards graded? But, just as their gambling on unknown TikTok and WhatNot streams contributes to the lack of supply elsewhere, their inability to think for themselves perpetuates this inflationary ecosystem.
PSA has already added 2.5 million more cards to the backlog. (Based on current orders before the shutdown cutoff.) Which will likely rise to somewhere between 3-5 million more cards, making the total backlog closer to 15 million cards. 
I wouldn’t be surprised if closer to 10M cards were submitted in the last few days leading up to the “shutdown”
The 4 month planned shutdown will likely be closer to 6 months
Well. Guess we can close the thread and return in 3 years when the backlog is done…
I am highly curious to see the backlog come June 15th after they received all the last minute orders.
And there are quite a few sports and TCG cards that are still worth grading at their cheapest service level, that might stabilize the backlog a bit
