There is a yearly fee for the membership to send in coins to grade for NGC and PCGS, with PCGS being higher so PCGS typically is used more often once a person starts grading more regularly or with numerous known higher value coins that can absorb the added cost. Or maybe in your personal case with having enough coins to grade together to justify it. The returns on PCGS coins, at least with top grades tend to be the highest, but with other coins its not so important.
Anacs is cheaper to grade with no membership fee so it can be attractive in some cases when starting out or for modern/error coins that otherwise wouldnt be worthwhile normally to grade, but may in some cases return less value on the sale and so people may prefer then to pay the small fee for a ngc membership to start instead which was what my personal choice was. There used to be a bigger discount on NGC also through
ANA membership which had influenced me to use NGC, now its smaller but still has one. So at the moment I'd say NGC, or possibly PCGS if the costs and types of coins warrant it. You can still use anacs, just would have your ngc or pcgs for the better coins. Big sellers and regular sellers tend to eventually move up to pcgs as mentioned, but not so much when your just starting out with a few coins or cheaper moderns mostly.
You can find the price guide
https://www.ngccoin.com/price-guide/united-states/ (for potential value after grading a certain grade) as well as the submit fees at NGC here as one example
https://www.ngccoin.com/submit/services-fees/ngc/ Overall the grading fees are reasonable when grading multiple coins at once (such as due to the $10 added fee per order plus shipping back and forth added) to each order plus the membership fee added per year which also means you would want to have coins to send in regularly, but hard to recommend for just a few coins unless of high value.
Edited by datadragon
12/19/2023 2:09 pm
Posted 12/18/2023 2:32 pm
