Why SnapGrade Uses Credit-Based Pricing (and Why Credits Never Expire)

Most software products in this space default to subscriptions. SaaS is a comfortable business model — predictable monthly revenue, low effort to renew, automatic charges on the same day forever.

We chose not to do that. SnapGrade uses credit-based pay-as-you-go pricing, and credits never expire — buy a pack today and use a credit two years from now if you want.

Here’s why.

Card grading is not a subscription-shaped problem

Most collectors don’t pre-grade every day. They pre-grade in bursts — when a new set drops, when they’re prepping a PSA submission, when they’re listing cards for sale. A subscription forces them to pay during the long quiet periods between those bursts.

That’s bad for the user. Worse, it changes the incentive: if you’re paying $X/month for “unlimited grades,” the tool is incentivized to keep you barely using it (so they don’t get crushed on inference costs). If you only pay when you grade, the tool is incentivized to make every grade genuinely useful, because you only buy more when the previous batch saved you money.

Credit-based pricing aligns us with you: we make money when you find value, not when you forget to cancel.

Why credits never expire

We could expire credits at 12 months and force a re-buy. Most platforms do. But the entire point of credits is that you buy them when it’s cheap and use them when you need them — and that doesn’t work if they vanish.

The hidden cost of expiring credits is psychological. If you bought a 50-credit pack and you’ve only used 30 by month 11, you’ll feel pressured to “use them up” on cards you don’t actually need to grade. That’s a tax on your judgment. It also makes the tool feel hostile.

So we don’t expire them. A credit you bought in 2024 will work in 2030. We’re committing to that explicitly because it’s the right way to run this product — and because we’d rather earn future business by being good than by being sticky.

The price ladder

Credits get cheaper in bulk, but the cheapest pack is still per-credit, not per-month:

• Single — $2 per credit. For testing.
• Starter — 8 credits for $12 ($1.50/card). For occasional collectors.
• Collector — 20 credits for $24 ($1.20/card). Most popular. For active pre-graders.
• Pro — 50 credits for $50 ($1.00/card). For dealers and high-volume submitters.

Need more? 120-credit packs and enterprise plans are available on request.

For reference: a single PSA submission is $25–$75. The Pro pack of 50 credits costs less than two PSA submissions. If pre-grading catches one bad card per submission, the pack pays for itself.

What confidence-refunds do

Here’s the part of the pricing model that’s most unusual: if our AI’s confidence on your card drops below 70%, the credit refunds automatically. You only pay for grades we’ll stand behind.

This is a hard commitment because it costs us money on edge-case cards. But it’s necessary for trust. A pre-grading tool that charges you for predictions it isn’t sure about is monetizing guesses — and we don’t want to do that.

Bottom line

Credit-based, never-expiring, confidence-refundable. Three things that make pre-grading feel like a tool you reach for when you need it, not a subscription you’re stuck with.

Grab 2 free credits and try it. No card on file, no auto-renew, no surprises.