Before you send a card off you want to know whether it stands a chance. TCGHeart measures one thing very precisely: how the artwork sits inside the borders. Every grader puts a hard limit on that.
The app photographs your card and measures the margin on all four sides. From that follows how far off centre it is, to a tenth of a percent.
Corners, edges and surface are not measured. That is exactly why the result is a ceiling and not a prediction: this is the highest grade centering still allows, not the grade you will get.
A PSA 10 allows a different offset on the front than a BGS 9.5 or an ACE 10. Front and back each have their own standard as well; at PSA the back is far more forgiving than the front.
So you do not see one number but a row: the highest this card can reach at PSA, BGS, CGC, ACE and TAG, each against their own published standards. Measure both sides and the worse of the two decides.
Next to each grade you see what that grade fetches for this card, based on real sales. In one screen you can tell whether the gap between a 9 and a 10 is worth the submission.
Where a grader publishes no standard for a grade you see a dash. We do not fill that in with a number we cannot back up.
Cards you send off go into a submission: which grader, which cards, what you pay per card. You move the submission through four stages yourself, from sent to returned.
When the cards come back you enter the real grade and see it next to the expectation. The grade is written onto the copy in your collection in one action, after which that card is valued as a slab.
We receive nothing back from any grader. Every step in that tracker is one you set yourself, and the app says so.
No. Only centering is measured. Corners, edges and surface also decide what you get in practice, and those are not looked at. What you see is the highest grade centering still allows.
PSA, BGS, CGC, ACE and TAG, each against their own published centering standards. Where a grader publishes no standard for a grade, we deliberately show no number.
You can, and it is more accurate. Beckett and CGC look at both sides, so with two measurements the result follows the worse of the two.
With some room around the card, not cropped tight to the edge. The measurement finds the border by contrast against the background, so too tight a crop can cost you a full grade.
A hundred a month. A Vendor organisation gets 400. When they run out you can buy more with points from the shop.