The question I get more than any other is some version of “which tradelines should I buy” — usually from someone staring at a broker’s list with forty cards on it, sorted by price, with no idea what separates the $500 one from the $1,400 one. The honest answer is that most of what you’re looking at is priced on one variable, and it isn’t the one people fixate on. Buyers walk in wanting the biggest credit limit they can afford. The listings are priced mostly on age.
I pull live pricing from three brokers every hour, so rather than tell you what I think, I’ll show you what the market is actually charging today and where the same card costs meaningfully different money depending on who’s selling it.
The full breakdown, refreshed hourly across 1,200-odd listings, lives here: current tradeline prices by limit and age. Everything below comes out of it.
Does card age or credit limit matter more?
Age, and it isn’t close. At Tradeline Supply Company right now, a $10,000–$19,999 card that’s ten years old asks $840. A $30,000–$39,999 card that’s two to four years old asks $690. The smaller card costs more, because it’s older — you’re paying a $150 premium for roughly a third of the credit limit.
Run it the other way and the gap widens. Inside that same $10,000–$19,999 bracket, going from a 2–4 year card to a 10+ year card takes the price from $480 to $840. Age alone nearly doubles it. Moving the limit up two whole brackets, holding age at 2–4 years, only takes you from $480 to $690.
This tracks with how scoring actually works. The CFPB’s list of what feeds a credit score includes both how long your accounts have been open and how much of your available credit you’re using. But length of history is the thing you cannot manufacture. You can lower your utilization this afternoon. Nobody can make an account older.
Why buying just above a bracket line wastes money
Brokers price in bands, not on a slope. The band that matters most is $10,000–$19,999 — one price for the whole range. That means a $19,500 limit and a $10,500 limit are the same product as far as the price tag is concerned, and one of them is nearly twice the card.
So the move is to buy at the top of a bracket and never at the bottom. A $10,200 card is the worst value on the list; a $19,800 card at the identical price is the best. The same logic runs through $20,000–$29,999 and $30,000–$39,999. Ask for the limit, not the bracket, and if a broker’s listing only shows a range, ask them to confirm the actual number before you pay.
(I have bought the bottom of a bracket. More than once, before I started keeping the table. It is an entirely avoidable way to donate a few hundred dollars.)
Which broker is cheapest for the card you want?
Different ones, depending on the age — and the spread is large enough to be the whole decision. Today’s asking prices:
- $10,000–$19,999, 10+ years — TSC $840 · TradelineScore $525 · Boost Credit 101 $605
- $20,000–$29,999, 10+ years — TSC $1,020 · TradelineScore $735 · Boost Credit 101 $779
- $30,000–$39,999, 10+ years — TSC $1,440 · TradelineScore $840 (thin data) · Boost Credit 101 $927
- $20,000–$29,999, 2–4 years — TSC $600 · TradelineScore $735 · Boost Credit 101 $516
Two things fall out of that. First, TSC charges a serious premium on old cards — 55% more than Boost Credit 101 for a ten-year-old $30k line — while being competitive or cheaper on young ones. They’re the biggest broker and the deepest inventory, and the old cards are where they price like it.
Second, and this is the one worth the whole article: TradelineScore barely prices age at all. In the $10,000–$19,999 bracket they ask $525 for a 2–4 year card, $525 for a 5–9 year card, and $525 for a 10+ year card. Same in the $20,000–$29,999 bracket at $735 flat. If age is the thing you’re actually buying, and their pricing ignores age, then a ten-year-old card from them at $525 is the same asset TSC is asking $840 for. (Caveat where you’d expect one: some of their older-card cells rest on a handful of listings, so inventory is thinner than the price suggests.)
Which issuers should you avoid?
American Express, unless someone has explained the catch and you’ve decided you don’t care. Since 2015 Amex has reported authorized users with the date the user was added, not the date the account was opened. So a twenty-year-old Amex lands on your report looking like it opened last week. You are buying a premium brand and receiving a brand-new account. Brokers who know what they’re doing price Amex accordingly; brokers who don’t will happily sell you the prestige.
Beyond that, the issuer logo is close to irrelevant. Once the data posts, a $30,000 ten-year-old Chase account and a $30,000 ten-year-old Capital One account are the same three numbers on your report. Buyers reach for Chase anyway, which is why Chase inventory moves fastest and rarely gets discounted. If you’re flexible on the name, Discover, Barclays and US Bank cards sit around at better prices for identical numbers. The one issuer with a real reliability problem is Citi, which has a long-standing reputation for simply not reporting authorized users — that’s a posting risk, not a pricing one, and it’s the kind of thing to ask a broker about directly before ordering.
So what should you actually buy?
If you’re optimizing for what shows up on the report per dollar spent: the oldest card you can find, at the top of its limit bracket, from whichever broker prices that age band cheapest — which today, for anything over ten years, is usually not the biggest broker. Skip Amex. Don’t pay the Chase tax unless you specifically want Chase.
What a tradeline can’t do is fix the things underneath. It won’t remove a collection, it won’t repair payment history, and it won’t survive the cycle — the standard product is roughly two months on your report, then it comes off. It’s a nudge on two inputs, not a rebuild. If you want the mechanics of how the posting actually works and what the timing looks like, that’s covered in the questions buyers ask most, and if you’re weighing a specific limit rather than a bracket, I broke one of them down in detail in what a $20,000 tradeline actually buys you.
And check the prices before you order rather than trusting a number you saw last month. The three brokers move independently, the spread between them on the same card runs several hundred dollars, and the price table updates itself every hour precisely so nobody has to take my word for it.
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