Every week, cards worth hundreds to thousands of euros go out of the door, and keeping track of them comes down to scattered messages. That can be done better, and it needn’t cost anyone extra work.
Grading almost always starts the same way. You have a card you care about, you want to know what it’s worth, and you find out that submitting to PSA or Beckett yourself is expensive and cumbersome. So you look for someone who does it for lots of people at once.
From that moment on, something changes. You hand over something valuable and get a group chat in return. You ask how it’s going, someone else asks again an hour later, and the middleman answers the same question fifty times a week. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The tools just don’t fit.
GradeGate is built around one idea: every step the middleman takes anyway should automatically be visible to the collector. Not as extra work on top, but as a by-product of the work itself.
Every decision in the app and the console has been checked against these four. They’re here not as a promise, but because you can see them in what the product does.
A photo of every card goes along with the submission, and on arrival the middleman confirms card by card that it matches. Trust is nice, but if something goes wrong you want something concrete to point to.
GradeGate doesn’t assign you a middleman and doesn’t put anyone at the top because they pay for it. You see the packages, prices, turnaround times and reviews, and then you choose.
What you see when you submit is recorded. If the middleman changes their rates later, nothing changes for your submission in progress.
Their own packages, their own status steps, their own Mollie account where the money comes in directly. We don’t sit between you and your customer, only between the question and the answer.
A collector wants to know where their card is. A middleman wants to do the work without explaining that over and over. It’s the same question, seen from two sides.
You should know where your card is, what it costs before you check out, what happens if something goes wrong, and who you can take a question to. That’s no luxury for a parcel worth a few hundred or a few thousand euros; it’s the minimum.
See what you getThe hours spent answering status questions are hours you don’t spend on cards. If you work in the console, the collector automatically sees where their submission is. And because reviews of response time, processing time and packaging are kept separate, you see what you’re good at instead of one score with nothing to go on.
See the consoleWhere this needs to go isn’t complicated: having a card graded should feel as ordinary as tracking a parcel. The more middlemen are visible, the less it matters which group chat you happen to be in, and the more it’s about who does their work well.
An about page that only tells you what’s coming says nothing. This is where things stand today.
Grading companies can create a business account today, set up their packages and addresses and get ready for their first submissions.
First in the App Store, the Android version after that. Until then there’s nothing for collectors to download yet, and we’d rather say so than put up a button that does nothing.
New grading companies are checked by hand before collectors can find them. That takes us time and keeps the list clean.
If you’re a middleman and want to know whether this fits your process, we’ll go through it with you.
Book a demoPrefer to read up first? The home page sets out what the console does.