Reading your IU balance

What Intelligence Units are

Intelligence Units, IUs, are how Verinode meters the AI work IQ does on your behalf: reading a document, drafting a plan, running a benchmark comparison, answering a question in chat. Every Executive, Premier, or Reserve membership includes a monthly allotment of IUs, and you can add more three ways when you need them. This article covers the balance summary block at the top of Billing, the one place that shows how many IUs you have, how much of this month's allotment you have used, and what happens when the balance runs out.

Verinode does not decide how you spend IUs. IQ surfaces recommendations and you choose which ones to act on; the IU balance simply tracks the AI capacity behind that work so you can see it clearly, the same way a fractional COO would keep you posted on their own hours.

Where to find it

Open Billing from the Account section of the sidebar, at /account/billing. The page heading reads "Intelligence Units," with a currency toggle (USD / CAD) beside it. The balance summary sits directly under that heading, above the three ways to add IUs (one-time bundles, recurring monthly, and pay-as-you-go via auto-top-up).

The balance summary block

The summary is a two-column layout: Available on the left, This month on the right.

Available

The left column shows your total available IUs, one large number, all your IU sources added together in a single figure with "IUs" beside it. That total is the sum of four buckets:

• Included balance, the unused portion of this month's included allotment.
• Status bonus balance, any bonus IUs credited to your account (for example, the trial or onboarding grants Verinode extends at certain moments).
• Recurring balance, IUs delivered by a recurring monthly subscription (see "Adding IUs when you are running low" below, or your current recurring subscription section if you have one active).
• Prepaid balance, IUs from one-time bundles you have purchased, valid for 12 months from purchase.

Whichever bucket a given AI action draws from, the Available number is the one figure that tells you whether IQ can keep working right now.

This month

The right column reads your monthly allotment and how much of it you have used, for example "350 of 1,500 included used (23%)." That is your tier's included IU allotment for the calendar month, minus whatever is left in your Included balance:

• Executive: 1,500 IUs/month included.
• Premier: 6,000 IUs/month included.
• Reserve: 15,000 IUs/month included.

A horizontal progress bar under the percentage fills left to right as you use the month's allotment. It renders in Monitor Teal up to 79% used, then switches to Copper at 80% or higher, a visual heads-up that you are approaching the end of this month's included capacity before you need to read the percentage itself.

If you also hold prepaid bundle IUs, a line appears beneath the progress bar: "+ N prepaid bundle IUs available." This is separate from the monthly allotment, prepaid IUs do not expire at month end and do not count against the percentage-used bar, they only show up in the Available total on the left.

The paused state

When your total Available balance reaches zero, a line appears under the Available number in Ember Red: "AI is paused. Operator-initiated work is queued."

This means IQ is not running new AI-initiated actions on your account, chat responses, plan drafting, extraction of new documents, and so on wait until you add IUs. Nothing you already have is deleted or hidden: existing decisions, benchmarks you have already unlocked, and documents already processed remain fully visible. Work you had asked for is queued, not lost, and resumes automatically the moment your balance is topped up, whether that is a purchased bundle landing, a recurring subscription IU grant, an auto-top-up firing, or your next monthly allotment refresh.

To get out of a paused state, use any of the three ways to add IUs further down the Billing page (see "Adding IUs when you are running low" below), or turn on auto-top-up so this does not happen again unannounced.

The Contributor view

If you are on the Contributor tier (the free tier every operator starts on), the balance summary does not show the Available / This month layout at all. Instead it reads:

"Your Contributor plan includes a starter allocation of Intelligence Units. Become an Executive, Premier, or Reserve Member for a full monthly capacity and every AI feature."

with a See tiers → button that opens the membership comparison. Contributors receive a one-time starter IU allocation when they sign up and cannot purchase additional IUs or a recurring subscription while on that tier; upgrading to a paid membership is what unlocks the monthly allotment, the three ways to add IUs, and auto-top-up.

Loading state

Before the balance loads, the page shows a plain line, "Loading balance…", where the summary will appear. This is a normal fetch-in-progress state on page load, not an error, it resolves within a second or two on a typical connection.

Adding IUs when you are running low

Three mechanisms sit below the balance summary on the same page, each covered in its own help article:

• One-time bundles, four fixed sizes (250 / 1,000 / 5,000 / 20,000 IUs), a discrete purchase good for 12 months, no recurring commitment.
• Recurring monthly, the same four sizes delivered every month at the deepest per-IU discount, cancel any month.
• Auto-top-up, off by default, opt-in only: set a balance threshold and a charge amount, and Verinode charges your saved card automatically when your balance drops below that threshold, always with a 24-hour advance email before any charge fires.

Where your tier has a pay-as-you-go rate configured, the page shows it directly under the purchase grids: "Pay-as-you-go rate at your tier: [rate] / IU." That per-IU rate is what auto-top-up charges use; one-time bundles are consistently the better per-IU deal, so if you are topping up often, a bundle purchase usually beats leaving auto-top-up as your main source of extra capacity.

Best-practice example

If you see "This month: 1,320 of 1,500 included used (88%)" with the bar showing Copper, and Available reads a total that is mostly Included balance with no Prepaid or Recurring cushion, that is the moment to act, not after the paused banner appears. Buy a 250-IU bundle to cover the rest of the month, or turn on auto-top-up with a threshold above zero so the pause never triggers mid-decision. If Available already reads zero and the red "AI is paused" line has appeared, any of the three add-IU paths brings capacity back immediately, queued AI work resumes as soon as the new balance lands.

Related reading

• The decision workspace, for what AI-initiated work actually looks like once IUs fund it.
• The Feed, where AI-drafted cards appear as IUs are spent.
• Acting on decisions, for the Discuss and Act actions that consume IU capacity.
• How benchmarks work, for the peer intelligence your IU-funded AI work draws on.

Data sources