The certification number on a PSA slab is a key to a database. Until recently, that key was useful only on PSA's own website — type it into the cert lookup, see the record, copy each field into your inventory by hand. That's a meaningful chunk of time when you have a binder of fifty graded cards in front of you.
That step is gone. As of this month, Vaultry talks to the official PSA Public API directly. Scan the slab, and the entire grading record drops into your card form.
What gets filled in
A successful cert lookup populates:
- Grade — PSA's numeric or qualified grade (PSA 10, PSA 8.5, AUTH, etc.)
- Year — the year the card was issued
- Set — the parent set name (1986 Topps, 2020 Bowman Chrome, etc.)
- Card Number — the in-set sequence
- Player or Character — the subject on the card
- Parallel — refractor / prism / numbered variant, if applicable
- Sport — baseball, basketball, football, hockey, Pokémon TCG, etc.
- Brand — Topps, Bowman, Upper Deck, Panini, Wizards of the Coast, etc.
- Grading Service — locked to PSA when the lookup runs
Empty fields fill in; existing values aren't overwritten. The lookup respects what you've already entered — it's an assistant, not a steamroller.
How to use it
Open any Trading Cards collection, click Add Card, and point at the Certification Number field. There are now three buttons next to it:
- Scan — opens the camera scanner. Tilt the slab so the Code 128 barcode (or the QR code on newer / CGC slabs) faces the lens. The decoder confirms with a beep + green flash, fills the cert number, and triggers the lookup automatically.
- Lookup — for when the cert number is already typed in (or you typed it from a slab you can't reach). Single tap, full record returned.
- Verify — deep-links to PSA's public cert lookup page so you can sanity-check the record outside Vaultry if you ever want to.
The same Scan-then-Lookup pattern works in Bulk Add mode, where Continuous Scan reopens the camera after every save. A binder of fifty cards moves about as fast as you can flip pages.
How we paid for it (so you don't, unless you want to)
The PSA Public API has a free tier capped at 100 calls per day per token. That's not enough for casual users sharing a single token. So we built two paths:
- Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). Sign up for your own PSA developer token (it takes about two minutes) and paste it into Settings → Integrations. We proxy the call through using your token; the quota and any future upgrades are yours to manage. Cost on Vaultry's side: nothing extra.
- Managed. Toggle on "Use Vaultry's key — easy mode." We use our shared, paid-tier token, meter each call, and bill it back through Stripe as a small per-call add-on. The Settings panel shows your usage against your monthly cap in real time.
The free tier of Vaultry never touches a paid integration unless you turn one on. Manual entry of every PSA field is and remains free on every plan.
Cache once, save quota forever
PSA records are immutable after grading — a card graded PSA 9 in 2018 will still be PSA 9 in 2030. So we cache every cert lookup the first time we see it. The next person who scans the same slab gets the record from our cache, never burns a quota call, and gets a "Source: cache" line in the lookup status. Your token (BYOK or Managed) only pays for genuinely new lookups.
What's next
The same plumbing extends to CGC, SGC, and BGS as soon as those services publish public APIs or approve our partner-program applications. CGC and SGC already have cert-verify deep-links shipped; BGS uses a form-only lookup with no clean URL pattern, so we're waiting for them to expose something. For coins, PCGS and NGC scan-and-verify are already in place; full auto-fill from their partner APIs is the next big push there too.
In the meantime: if you have a binder of PSA-graded cards sitting in a closet that you've been meaning to catalog, this is the week to do it.