The IU balance chip in the header

What it is

The IU balance chip is the small rounded pill that reads a number followed by "IU", for example 480 IU. It is the running total of Intelligence Units your membership currently holds, the capacity IQ draws on every time it runs an analysis, answers you in chat, or works through a decision on your behalf. IUs are not a technical token count you need to think about day to day, they are simply the meter behind the AI Co-COO's work, denominated in outcomes you already understand: decisions and conversations.

Click the pill and it opens the Intelligence Units overlay, the full spend log for your account. Everything else in this article, the color, the pulse, the warning, is the chip trying to tell you one of three things at a glance: how much capacity you have, whether something just spent it, and whether it is time to add more.

Where to find it

The chip lives in the page header, next to the page title, on two screens under Settings in the sidebar:

• Settings (/settings), the section index itself.
• Settings → Membership (/settings/membership).

Only the account admin sees it. On a Premier membership with multiple seats, the other members on the account do not get their own balance chip, capacity is tracked at the account level, and the admin is the one who manages it, tops it up, or waits for the next allotment. If you don't see the chip in your header, that is expected for a non-admin member, not a bug.

The chip does not render at all until your balance has loaded once from the server. On first paint of the page there is a brief moment with no chip, then it appears as soon as the first fetch succeeds. It also does not show up anywhere on the HQ side of the platform, HQ's network-intelligence view does not carry an operator IU economy.

Reading the pill

The pill shows a small colored dot, then your balance as a whole number with thousands separators, then the letters "IU": for example ● 1,240 IU. Two colors:

• Copper, the normal state. Your balance is healthy relative to your allotment.
• Amber, the low-balance state, covered below.

Hover the pill and a tooltip explains the number in plain terms rather than as a raw count, for example: "About 41 decisions or 413 conversations left. At your pace, lasts about 3 weeks. Click to see spend." Until Verinode has enough of your usage history to translate the balance into outcomes, the tooltip falls back to a plainer line: "Intelligence Units. Click to see spend."

The spend pulse-down animation

The chip checks your balance in the background about once a minute while the page is open. If a check comes back lower than the last one, the pill briefly shrinks to about 95% of its size and springs back, a quick visual cue that something you (or an automated flow) just did spent capacity: an agent run finished, a chat turn completed, a document ingestion posted its cost. You don't have to do anything when you see it, it's just confirmation that the spend you'd expect actually happened.

If your balance only ever goes up between checks (a monthly allotment landing, a top-up, an earned credit), the pulse-down never fires, since it triggers on decreases only.

The low-balance amber warning

When your balance drops under roughly 15% of your monthly allotment, the chip switches from copper to amber and pulses continuously rather than the one-off spend animation, a steady, low-key breathing effect rather than a popup or a badge count. Verinode is deliberately not a freemium game about running out of credits, so there is no interrupting "buy more" modal, no red exclamation mark. The pill just quietly changes color and keeps pulsing until your balance recovers, either from a top-up or from your next monthly allotment landing.

Clicking through: the Intelligence Units overlay

Click the pill and the Intelligence Units overlay opens, labeled Membership at the top with a Last 50 entries note in the header. It has three parts, top to bottom.

Your balance

A hero panel headed Your balance shows the same number as the chip, larger, in the same copper-or-amber coloring. Directly under it:

• The outcome translation, when Verinode has enough history to compute one: "About N decisions or M conversations".
• A personalized runway line, when a burn rate can be measured: "At your pace, this lasts [about N weeks / about N days]."
• The allotment context: "of [allotment] this period (X% remaining)".
• If you're in the low-balance state, a warning line in amber: "You're approaching your usage limit. Top up below or wait for your next allotment."

Last 30 days, or the usage planner

Below the balance hero, one of two things appears, depending on whether you've actually spent anything in the trailing 30 days:

If you have spend on record: a Last 30 days section reads "You've spent [total] IU in the last 30 days", followed by a Breakdown of up to six categories, each a small tile showing the category label and the IU amount, largest spend first. Categories come from the reason recorded on each ledger entry (see the table below).

If you have no spend yet (a brand-new membership, or one that hasn't used IQ this month), the panel is replaced by a short planner headed "How much will you lean on IQ?" with three plain-language pace options: Now and then (a few decisions a week), Most weeks (part of your routine), and All in (across your whole operation). Pick one and the planner shows roughly how many decisions a month that pace works out to, a coverage bar comparing that to what your membership includes, and, if you already hold a balance, how long it would last at that pace. This exists specifically because a fresh account has no history yet to project a runway from, so it lets you state your own expectation instead.

Activity

A table headed Activity lists your ledger, most recent first, up to 50 rows, four columns:

• When, a relative date: a time of day if it happened today, a weekday if within the last week, otherwise the month and day.
• Reason, a plain label for what the entry was. Grants read things like Monthly allotment, Annual allotment, Admin grant, Signup bonus, Carried forward, or Tier reward. Earned credits read Earned · contribution, Earned · referral, or Earned · validation. Spend reads Agent run, Research report, Analysis, Ingestion, or Other spend. Corrections read Refund, Expired, or Adjustment. Anything Verinode hasn't mapped to one of these labels yet is shown as a humanized version of its internal name rather than raw database text.
• Δ IU, the change on that entry: green with a leading "+" for anything added to your balance, and in the signal color used for spend elsewhere on the platform for anything deducted.
• Balance, your running balance immediately after that entry posted.

Empty state. A brand-new account with no ledger entries yet shows a single centered row: "No activity yet."

Footer

A closing line reads "IU never expire while your membership stays active." Beside it, an Add capacity button opens the IU top-up flow so you can purchase additional capacity without leaving the overlay.

What "decisions" and "conversations" mean

Verinode never wants you reasoning in raw compute units, so every IU number pairs with what it buys. The rough exchange rates behind the translation:

• A decision, the platform's standard unit of AI Co-COO work (a save-plan, an action plan, a margin or business analysis run), costs about 30 IU.
• A deep dive, a high-stakes specialist-level analysis, costs about 15 IU.
• A conversation, one back-and-forth chat turn with IQ, costs about 3 IU.

These are rounded display anchors, not a bill you'll be shown line by line, your actual ledger records the real cost of each operation. Once you have enough usage history, the translation shown in the chip and the overlay switches from this default even split to your own actual mix of decisions, deep dives, and conversations, so the "About N decisions or M conversations" line reflects how you personally use IQ, not a generic average.

1. 1Glance at the chip in your Settings header. Copper means you're in good shape; amber means you're inside the low-balance warning.
2. 2Hover it for the plain-English read: about how many decisions or conversations are left, and roughly how long that lasts at your pace.
3. 3Click it to open the full Intelligence Units overlay if you want the 30-day breakdown or the full activity log.
4. 4If you're low, either add capacity from the overlay's footer or simply wait, your next monthly allotment refills the balance automatically for paid memberships.

Related reading

• The decision workspace, what a "decision" actually looks like once you spend IU acting on one.
• Acting on decisions, the plans and next steps IU capacity funds.
• Understanding your margin, how membership tier and IU allotment tie back to what IQ can do for your business.