Pre-Grading: How to Stop Wasting Money on PSA Submissions

Every collector who has graded cards has a story about the submission that went wrong — the card they were sure was a 10 that came back a 8, the fee they will never get back. Pre-grading exists to prevent exactly that.

What pre-grading means

Pre-grading is estimating a card's grade before you submit it officially. The goal is simple: only send cards that will come back in a grade high enough to justify the cost.

Why it saves money

Grading fees add up fast, especially across a bulk submission. If even a few of your cards come back lower than expected, the math can turn negative on the whole batch. Pre-grading lets you cut the weak candidates before you pay.

Consider a typical mistake:

• You submit ten cards expecting mostly 10s.
• Half come back as 9s, two as 8s.
• The graded values barely beat the raw prices once fees are subtracted.

A reliable pre-grade would have flagged the off-center and scratched cards so you only sent the genuine 10 candidates.

What to look for when pre-grading

Check all four factors, not just the holo shine: centering on the front and back, corner whitening, edge chipping, and surface scratches. The cards that pass all four are your real submission candidates.

How AI makes pre-grading easy

Eyeballing centering ratios and hunting for hairline scratches is slow and error-prone. Cardemon does it from two photos: scan the front and back, and the app returns an overall grade, four sub-grades, and a list of the flaws it detected.

A simple workflow

1. Scan every candidate in Cardemon.
2. Keep only the cards estimated at your target grade.
3. Submit that shortlist to PSA, BGS, or SGC.

Pre-grading will not make a 8 into a 10, but it will stop you from paying to grade the 8 in the first place. Run your next submission through Cardemon before you mail anything.