How it works

Using the calculator

1. 1

   Search for your card

   Type the card name into the search bar. Select the card you're thinking of grading from the results.

2. 2

   Check the market price

   HoloGains pulls the current market price automatically and pre-fills price fields where data is available. You can override the market price if you have a more accurate figure — for example, the price you actually paid for the card.

3. 3

   Enter your grading cost

   Select the grading service tier you plan to use. This is added to the card price to give your total investment.

4. 4

   Review your results

   HoloGains shows your expected profit, expected ROI, and the break-even grade — the lowest grade at which you'd turn a profit.

Fees sourced from psacard.com. Value, Value Plus, and Value Max are currently paused by PSA and can't be selected. Verify current pricing before submitting cards.

How the ROI is calculated

Your total cost is the raw card price plus the grading fee. The profit for each grade is then worked out by subtracting that total cost from the sale price for that grade.

Not every card comes back a grade 10. To account for this, each grade's profit is weighted by the probability of actually achieving that grade. Where available, these probabilities are derived from real historical sales data from PokémonPriceTracker — specifically the proportion of total sales that came back at each grade. Grades 1–6 are excluded as they represent grading failures. If PokémonPriceTracker data isn't available, HoloGains falls back to general estimates. Your results show which one was used via a "Sales Based" or "Estimated" badge:

The weighted profits are averaged into an expected profit figure, adjusted for data confidence (see the confidence section below), and the expected ROI is expressed as a percentage of total cost.

Based on the ROI, HoloGains gives a recommendation: above 30% suggests grading is worth it, 10–30% is a borderline case, and below 10% suggests selling the card raw.

Where prices come from

HoloGains fetches prices from two sources in parallel and combines them:

What low confidence means

Confidence shows up in two different ways in HoloGains.

Each price field you see — Raw, PSA 7, PSA 8, PSA 9, PSA 10 — can carry its own "Low Confidence" warning, shown below the respective field. This reflects how many sales back that specific grade's price: if a grade's data comes from only a few sales, that field is flagged individually, regardless of how confident the other grades are.

Separately, the ROI calculation uses one overall confidence rating for the card as a whole, rather than a per-grade figure. Where PokémonPriceTracker data is available, this is based on the confidence levels across all priced grades — if most of them are low confidence, the card as a whole is treated as low confidence. When PokémonPriceTracker data isn't available, this overall rating is derived from the eBay data instead, based on both the number of listings and how consistent the prices are.

This overall confidence rating is separate from the grade probabilities used elsewhere on this page (e.g. PSA 9: 45%) — those reflect how likely a card is to achieve each grade, not how much data backs the price estimates.

So a field can show a low confidence warning without necessarily changing the card's overall confidence rating, and vice versa — they're related but calculated separately.

Confidence affects the results in two ways. First, for PokémonPriceTracker data, the price used for each low confidence grade switches to the median sale price rather than the weighted market price, giving a more conservative figure. Second, the expected profit is scaled down before the ROI is calculated, based on how much sales data backs the estimate:

• Very thin data (2 or fewer sales) — reduced by 40%, regardless of confidence level
• Low confidence — reduced by 35%
• Medium confidence — reduced by 15%
• High confidence — no reduction

The less data behind a price, the more conservative the estimate. This keeps low-data results cautious rather than best-case.