PGI deliberately grades the cards the majors don't want

Defining yourself by what you will not grade is rarer than it sounds, and PGI has done it deliberately: raw value under $100, produced after 1980, $12.50 a card with a 25-card minimum.

That constraint is what makes the price sustainable. A grader that accepts anything has to carry the insurance, handling and dispute risk of high-value cards, and those costs land on every submission. Refusing that segment is how $12.50 stays $12.50.

The coverage of magazine cards and foreign issues is the part that has no real substitute. The majors underserve those categories because the volume is not there, which means for those specific cards PGI is not the cheap option — it is often the only one. Fit the grader to the card and this works. Ignore the band it defined and it does not.