Buying Intelligence Units: bundles vs recurring

What this page is for

Intelligence Units (IUs) are what pay for AI work in Verinode: every decision IQ works through, every document it reads, every recommendation it builds spends IUs. Your membership tier includes a monthly allotment of them, but a busy month can run past that allotment before the month resets. This page is where you add more, either as a one-time top-up or as a standing monthly subscription, and where you can turn on automatic top-ups if you'd rather not think about it at all.

Verinode never auto-charges you for anything on this page unless you explicitly turn on auto-top-up. Buying a bundle or starting a recurring subscription is always a deliberate click through Stripe checkout.

Where to find it

Open Settings and go to the Membership tab. Under Add Capacity, click Add Intelligence Units, or from the Compare & Manage block click Manage membership. Either route lands you at /account/billing, titled Intelligence Units on the page itself. You can also reach it directly by URL if it's bookmarked.

This is a different surface from the Compare & Manage block next to it on the same Membership tab, that one is for comparing or switching your Executive / Premier / Reserve membership tier itself. The IU billing page you're reading about here is only about adding IU capacity on top of whatever tier you're already on.

Your balance, at the top of the page

If you're on a paid tier (Executive, Premier, or Reserve), the page opens with two figures side by side:

• Available: your total usable IU balance right now, combined across every source, your monthly included allotment, any status bonus, any active recurring subscription, and any prepaid bundles. If your account is paused, a line reads "AI is paused. Operator-initiated work is queued." in red underneath, meaning your balance has hit zero and AI actions are held until you add capacity.
• This month: how much of your monthly included allotment you've used so far, written as "X of Y included used (Z%)," with a progress bar underneath. The bar runs teal up to 80% used, then switches to copper past that, a visual heads-up that you're closing in on the point where you'll need included IUs from elsewhere. If you have prepaid bundle IUs sitting in reserve, a line underneath reads "+ N prepaid bundle IUs available," those don't count against the monthly bar since they don't expire with the month.

If you're still on the Contributor plan, this summary is replaced with a shorter note: your plan includes a starter allocation of Intelligence Units, and a See tiers → link opens the pricing comparison if you want to move to a paid membership for full monthly capacity.

The currency toggle

In the top right of the page, next to the page title, sits a small pill toggle with two options: USD and CAD. Whichever one is active is highlighted in copper. This single toggle controls every price shown on the page, bundle prices, recurring prices, and the pay-as-you-go rate note. Switch it and every number updates immediately. It doesn't change your membership currency or anything already billed, it only sets which currency you're about to buy IUs in.

CAD prices run roughly 1.4x the USD price on every bundle and recurring size, rounded to a clean number, reflecting exchange rate plus payment processing overhead on cross-border cards, not a punitive markup.

The two ways to add IUs

Below the balance summary, under Add Intelligence Units, the page lays out two purchase paths as tile grids. Both draw from the same four sizes: 250, 1,000, 5,000, and 20,000 IUs. Each tile shows the IU count, the price in your selected currency, and a call-to-action link. Clicking any tile opens Stripe checkout in a new page (the button briefly reads "Opening checkout…" while it does).

One-time bundles

Under One-time bundles, the subhead reads "Discrete prepaid. Use anytime within 12 months." Each tile shows a flat count ("250 IUs," "1,000 IUs," and so on) with Buy bundle → underneath the price. This is a single Stripe payment, not a subscription, charged once and never repeated. The IUs land in your prepaid balance and stay usable for 12 months.

Reach for a bundle when you know you have a specific stretch of heavier AI use coming and don't want an ongoing monthly charge. It's also the cheapest way to buy extra IUs outside your included allotment: see the pay-as-you-go comparison below.

Recurring monthly

Under Recurring monthly, the subhead reads "Deepest per-IU discount. Cancel any month." Each tile shows a monthly count ("250 IUs / month," and so on) with the price per month and Subscribe → underneath. This starts a Stripe subscription that renews automatically and credits the same IU count to your balance every billing cycle, on top of whatever your membership tier already includes.

The recurring price at every size is lower than the one-time bundle price at the same size, that's the "deepest per-IU discount" the subhead refers to: committing to the same amount every month costs less per IU than buying it once. If you have an active recurring subscription, a separate section further down the page, Current recurring subscription, shows what you're on and how to cancel (more on that below).

Choose recurring if your AI usage runs consistently above your included allotment month after month, rather than spiking occasionally.

The pay-as-you-go rate note

Beneath the two tile grids, if you're on a paid tier, a line reads: "Pay-as-you-go rate at your tier: [rate] / IU. Triggers only when auto-top-up is enabled and your balance crosses the threshold you set below." This is not a third purchase button, it's informational. It tells you the per-IU rate you'd pay if you turn on auto-top-up (covered in its own article, see the link below), and it's shown here specifically so you can compare it against the bundle and recurring prices above before deciding which mechanism to use.

The pay-as-you-go rate is set per membership tier, and it gets cheaper the higher your tier, Executive's rate is highest, Premier's lower, Reserve's lowest. This is the same ladder logic behind every part of IU pricing: buying more or committing to a standing arrangement costs less per unit than paying for it a sliver at a time.

Directly under the auto-top-up section further down the page (not part of the rate note itself, but worth reading together), a plain comparison spells out why this matters: a 250-IU one-time bundle is consistently a better deal than auto-top-up, with the bundle's per-IU price running roughly 30 to 50% lower than your tier's pay-as-you-go rate. Most operators who compare the two switch to bundles once they see it. If you expect to need extra capacity somewhat regularly but don't want to commit to a recurring subscription, buying a bundle ahead of time beats letting auto-top-up fire at the higher metered rate.

What happens after checkout

Stripe checkout opens in the same browser tab. Complete the payment there and you're returned to Verinode; a bundle purchase credits your prepaid balance and a recurring subscription starts your monthly credit cycle. If checkout can't open, for instance if Stripe couldn't resolve a price, a message shows inline on the page under the tile grids explaining that checkout couldn't start, rather than dropping you into a broken flow.

Canceling a recurring subscription

If you have an active recurring IU subscription, it appears in its own section beneath auto-top-up: Current recurring subscription, showing the monthly IU count and monthly price you're on. You can cancel from this page or through the Stripe customer portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing cycle, and any IUs already credited to your balance in that cycle stay yours, they don't get clawed back.

What this page doesn't cover

• Auto-top-up, the opt-in automatic charge that fires when your balance drops below a threshold you set, using the pay-as-you-go rate referenced above, lives in its own section on this same page but is documented separately.
• Comparing or switching your membership tier itself (Executive, Premier, Reserve) is a different flow, reached from Compare & Manage on the same Membership tab in Settings, not from this billing page.
• Per-operation IU costs, exactly how many IUs a given decision, document read, or AI action costs, live on the public Methodology page, linked at the bottom of this page under Need the math?

Related reading

• Understanding your margin
• How benchmarks work
• The decision workspace