The Independent Pricing Data Pledge

HobbyCardIndex is independently owned. No grading service, breaker or manufacturer owns any part of it. We do run a marketplace now, so this page also covers who pays us and how we keep that away from our prices.

Published April 18, 2026 · Updated September 29, 2026 · Maintained by Hobby Card Index · ~800 words

Why we built HobbyCardIndex independent

HobbyCardIndex (HCI) is a sports-card collection, pricing, and market-intelligence platform. We are not owned by a grading service, a card marketplace, a card breaker, or a manufacturer. Our data, our tools, and our incentives are ours alone.

In early 2026, that kind of independence became a rarer thing in the hobby.

What changed

Between 2021 and 2025, one company — Collectors Holdings — acquired three of the four major card-grading services: PSA (2021), SGC (February 2024), and Beckett (announced December 2025). The same company also owns CardLadder, one of the largest third-party card-pricing analytics platforms in the hobby.

On December 18, 2025, U.S. Congressman Pat Ryan formally asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether those acquisitions constitute an antitrust violation. The congressman’s letter to the FTC specifically named the vertical integration of grading + pricing analytics + card transactions under one parent company as a conflict-of-interest concern for collectors. Reporting on the letter and FTC request continued through the first quarter of 2026 across Sports Collectors Digest, ICv2, Comics Beat, Cllct, Value Added Resource, and Sports Collectors Daily.

We are writing this page not to attack competitors — they will speak for themselves — but to be clear about where HobbyCardIndex sits in the landscape, and what that means for your data.

What “independent” means, specifically

We commit to the following structural positions, in plain language:

1. We do not own, operate, or invest in a card-grading service. When our price-history data reflects PSA, BGS, SGC, or CGC grades, that data is observational — we are reporting on what the market did, not promoting what we want to grade.
2. We run a marketplace, and we’re upfront about what it earns us. Since September 2026 collectors can sell cards to each other on HCI. We charge the seller 8% of the item price when a card sells (plus card processing), and nothing to list or to buy. We also earn a commission from eBay when you buy through one of our eBay links. Neither one sets our prices. The price guide is built from what cards actually sold for across the hobby, and listings and sales on our own marketplace don’t feed it.
3. We do not run card-breaking streams or sell sealed product. Our data tells you what cards are worth, not what we want you to buy today.

Why this matters for your data

In any analytics business, the most important question is: who pays for what, and what are they paid to tell you?

When a pricing platform is owned by a grading service, the grading service benefits every time a user decides to grade a card. That creates a pressure — subtle or overt — for the pricing engine to tell stories that encourage grading. A card’s population report, a projected grade uplift, a “time to submit” recommendation — each of those outputs has a financial consequence for the parent company.

That isn’t a shot at any specific company. It’s a structural statement. Every platform inherits its incentives from its ownership structure. Ours is set up to keep your data integrity first.

Our independence promise

We commit to, and will publicly document on this page, the following:

• Prices come from real sales. What we show a card is worth comes from what copies of it actually sold for, eBay sold comps and completed sales across the hobby, not from asking prices and not from our own marketplace.
• Transparent methodology. Our market-temperature index, mover rankings, and grading-ROI calculations are documented in our public methodology notes. If we change how we calculate something, we version it.
• We do not sell your collection data. Your cards, your watchlist, your prices paid are yours. We use anonymized/aggregated market signals to improve our indices; we do not sell user-level data to grading services, marketplaces, or third parties.

The personal version of this story

Independence on this page is structural — ownership facts, capital structure, what we will and won’t touch. The personal version — why we built it this way, what the existing tools were doing wrong, how we think about the “we” in HCI — lives on the About page. Same project, different lens. If you want the founder voice and the methodology behind the data, that’s where to look.