TL;DR: PSA’s fee schedule is a percentage of your card’s value dressed up as a service menu, and they get away with it because none of us can individually afford to stop paying it.
To those unaware, economic rent is the slice of a price you collect because of your position instead of your product/service. That is, margin above cost that competition would normally eat. Rent-seeking is spending resources to build and defend that position instead of improving the underlying product/service. The rest of this post is checking whether PSA’s current policies fall into this practice, which is widely considered both immoral and harmful to market efficiency.
This started because I was pricing out my first proper grading order ever (as an europoor submitter, the math was extra ugly), and the fee table which initially confused the heck out of me finally clicked. Basically, you run each tier as a percent of its insured ceiling: $79.99/$1,500 = 5.3%. $149/$2,500 = 6%. $349/$5,000 = 7%. $999/$25k = 4%, so the same slice range of 4-7% all the way up. The physical service is identical at every rung, which includes the same graders, same seconds under the zoom, and the same plastic slabs. So what does the extra $900 between Regular and Premium actually buy you as a consumer, you might ask?
The standard defense by PSA and its apologists is insurance and liability, and sure, if a $25k card is lost, they owe more than on a $500 one. But PSA sells pure value-proportional coverage on their own EU portal: return insurance is €1.20 per €100. Their revealed price for “cover this cardboard” is 1.2%; the tier ladder runs 4-7%. Maybe there’s overhead I’m not seeing, but until someone shows it, those extra 3-6 points are the rent.
Ofc, this gets much worse. The so-called “PSA Guarantee” (which the whole peace-of-mind story leans on) says the following in their terms, section 13: “the Guarantee does not apply to, and cannot be utilized by, the original submitter.” The person paying the value-scaled fee is the one person contractually barred from using the guarantee (they even reserve the right to background-check whether a claimant is connected to you). And the ratchet only turns one way, because they determine your card’s value themselves (“in our sole discretion,” “by any means as we may determine”, actual T&C language), and can bump your tier “at any point in the process,” and you pre-authorize charges up to $500 without notice. Oh, and if your card comes back worth less than your tier? No clause for that, of course… An insurer that only ever re-rates in its own favor is not doing insurance. But hey, maybe I’m the one taking crazy pills here? None of this is new, which is the really bewildering part to me given the lack of outrage, especially in this forum.
What is actually happening, in my opinion, is that the prices are set by what they can get away with, not by what things cost. If someone is selling a $25,000 card, the calculus is simple: “we can probably get away with charging $1,000 because they’re still making money anyway and there aren’t competing services with the same recognition.” The obvious comeback here is to switch grading companies like CGC or TAG. But as we all know, that’s a trap, since the same card in the same condition in another slab returns ~5-10% less on modern and 20-37% less on vintage, so switching grading companies will cost any individual seller more than the fee does. Everyone knows it, and everyone submits anyway. This is the same reason Elsevier charges $100 for a PDF that costs cents to host, because nobody can afford to be first to leave, which is a classic coordination problem, as markets are bad at repricing standards.
Meanwhile the behavior by PSA tells you what the fee is actually for. We have seen two price increases in 13 months, then in June they paused the four cheapest tiers entirely while sitting on a 10M+ card backlog. Raising prices while rationing access only works when customers have no exit. And roughly 4 of every 5 cards graded anywhere now flow to one owner, since the parent company bought SGC (2024) and then Beckett (Dec 2025). The same owner holds the eBay vault, preferred-grader status on eBay, and Card Ladder, i.e. the comps database feeding the “any means” by which they value your card. That’s the “seeking” half of rent-seeking btw, where a company facing a record queue is spending on owning the toll booth, not on widening the road. As is mentioned in another thread, there is also an antitrust class action and a congressman asking the FTC to look at exactly this, so it’s not just “salt”.
To those whose defense is “high fees and paused tiers are bullish for my existing slabs” I’d ask you to notice what you’re really saying here. If the fee bought grading work, its size wouldn’t pump your slabs. It pumps them because it’s a gate.
So, scoring PSA against the definition from the top. Margin above cost, held by position: 1.2% insurance vs a 4-7% ladder, check. Resources spent entrenching the position instead of improving the product: SGC, Beckett, the vault and the comps database, bought while the queue passed 10M cards, check. None of this requires PSA to be cartoon villains by the way. Rent-seeking is just what a standard-setter drifts into once nobody can leave, which is exactly why it won’t fix itself or with time.
And to be clear about what an ad valorem fee on a network we collectively built means, it’s essentially a royalty on the hobby’s appreciation. PSA doesn’t need to own a single card to be long on your collection, because the skim is collected at the gate, and it grows with your gains. The efficiency cost isn’t abstract either, because with the cheap tiers paused, anything worth a few couple hundred bucks is priced out of authentication entirely, so that whole corner of the market stays raw, illiquid, and fake-prone.
I’m not anti-grading. I want to start (or continue) submitting like everyone else, but that’s the whole problem. Until something breaks the coordination lock (the courts, the FTC, or a trust shock they can’t grade their way out of), the only margin you control is your own: declaring low, grading very selectively, and keeping the rest raw.
I mean, think about what we’re all agreeing to here if we switch the example to real estate. You hire a builder at an agreed price, and three months later he won’t hand over the keys until you pay a bigger bill, because he has decided, “in his sole discretion, by any means,” that your house is worth more now than when you signed. And if the neighborhood had tanked instead? The contract has no clause for that direction. That’s the deal every submitter signs today.
So my questions to all of you are: at what % of card value does the fee stop being “cost of doing business” for you? 10%? 20%? 30%? And what mechanism, if any, do you think is preventing PSA from slowly raising that fee until it reaches your red line?
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