PSA has announced new prices effective immediately. TCG Bulk has been eliminated and consolidated into Value Bulk, which has increased in price to $24.99/card. Most other lower levels see price increases as well as turnaround time increases as well.
What are your thoughts? Will you keep grading with PSA or make a switch?
Huge price increase on the lowest tier. By eliminating one and raising the other it’s like a 25% jump.
Mike
PSA Japan also announced a price hike and no bulk tier.
Makes sense given their consolidated share of a booming market. People will still submit as long as they can make money grading.
The real question is how will the gold stars be affected by this? What will Ken Goldin do?
PSA trying to cut down on the burgerchus and other high volume cards for the time being it seems.
Cant imagine with the 30th anniversary it gets much better for them.
Guys, guys, I was already done submitting to them for the foreseeable future, you don’t have to keep reaffirming me
I remember when we were waiting for bulk to go back down to $10/card just a few years ago. Crazy how quickly things have changed. Price memory continues to mess with me in all facets of the market
Wild they didn’t give a small window to submit at the old rates. Usually they gave a 12 hour notice. Had a 60+ card order drafted ready to go. Now it’s $300 more for one sub.
This might be the start of submissions significantly sliding down. Who is paying $25 for bulk cards?
PSA raising prices: 
Other grading companies raising prices: 
Prior to the increase, I was already not submitting anything that was under $25. Now my threshold probably goes up to $50 before I feel like it is worth it to submit something.
This is a de facto position that they don’t really want to grade bulk cards anymore. When the majority of bulk will be more expensive to grade than can be bought already graded
Its crazy PSA was founded on grading the rare cards AND for building sets (like all the cards in 1970 Topps). Here we are now where you can’t afford to grade sets or species anymore
There’s also a side effect of there being too many cards in every tcg now, so virtually no one is really keeping up with completing graded sets either
For sets I was more thinking 60s, 70s sports. For Pokémon I was thinking species. Trying to complete a PSA 10 of your favorite species? Now it costs $25 to grade that 10 cent reverse holo. Ouch
Maybe one day well look back at $25/card and think “cheap”.
I’ll still be submitting cards, but maybe a few less each time.
I will make the not-that-insightful statement that the enshitification of PSA is somewhat expected giving the enshitifaction of collecting more broadly
Would this not also just increase the cost of the cards on the back end as well? Like, if someone’s paying $24/card, the cost isn’t going to be anything below $24. Same for the other tiers.
I guess the problem I’m seeing is that people will still send in cards but then they’ll charge more when they list them to make their money back.
Reading through this forum people have still sent in their cards even when PSA raises their prices. Everything just becomes more expensive for the buyer.
Well that is not the case, it has since PSA started grading Pokemon been many chances to buy cards under the grading cost. I have maybe 20+ PSA Pikachu promos that I have payed less then the grading fee for, same for my Hoopa collecting. Its all about demand for the card. If its a 50cent card it does not mean its a 25$+ dollar card just because you payed someone 25$ to look at it
Not always, sometimes people sell cards for less than what they cost to encapsulate them before the initial purchase price. It’s easy to “forget” purchase price if you pulled it, though. That’s not exclusive to people who need to sell either.
PSA has increased prices in the past, I find it ultimately depends on the card and the grade. A 10 has a much wider room for profit than a 7, so you’d likely see someone including submission fees into a listing for a 7 since it could/would have been a disappointing return that may end up resubmitted in future, if that makes sense.
An easy way around all of this is to find another grading company, IMHO, haha! It’s all arbitrary value outside of the submission fees.
