How IU costs are calculated

What this page is

Intelligence Units (IUs) are what pay for the AI work Verinode does for you: reading a document, running a decision, holding a chat turn with an agent. Every operation has a published IU cost, set in advance and reviewed on a fixed schedule, never computed after the fact from how much compute it happened to burn. The Methodology page is where that full cost table lives in public, alongside a calculator that turns your expected usage into a monthly IU number and a projected dollar cost at each membership tier.

This is not marketing copy. It is the same table the product uses to price every operation, published so you can check the math yourself before you commit to a tier.

Where to find it

Open Account from the sidebar, then the Billing tab (/account/billing, titled "Billing & Intelligence Units"). Below your balance and the three ways to add IUs, a section reads:

Need the math? Per-operation IU costs and the pre-purchase calculator are on the public methodology page.

Click Open methodology → and it takes you to /methodology.

There is a second path in from Settings. Under the Membership tab, open the Credits view ("Add Capacity"). Alongside the Add Intelligence Units button sits See per-operation IU costs, which goes to the same /methodology page.

/methodology is a public page (it does not require you to be signed in), because the pricing page links to it as the "show your math" answer to "why does this cost what it costs."

Published IU costs by operation

The methodology page's Intelligence Units section opens with the core idea: 1 IU is a Verinode-published unit of value, not a raw token count. The cost of every operation sits in a config table, decoupled from Verinode's underlying LLM bill, so when the price of the model changes behind the scenes, you never see a surprise charge on your side.

The Published IU costs by operation table has three columns: Operation, IU cost, and Default model. Each row also carries a short description of what the operation actually does. Here is the full table as published:

| Operation | IU cost | Default model | What it covers | |---|---|---|---| | Cert / safety quick check | 5 | Haiku | Routine credential lookup, OSHA-record skim, single-document validation. | | Vendor specialist agent call | 25 | Sonnet | One conversation turn with a domain agent (vendor, equipment, compliance, hiring). | | Standard decision generation | 30 | Sonnet | Default fractional-COO decision: action title, monthly loss, consequence headline, plan. | | Multi-agent action plan | 75 | Sonnet | Plan composed across multiple specialists: surveys, email templates, talking points, expected artifacts. | | Cross-section orchestrator | 100 | Sonnet | Compound-pattern detection across margin, vendors, team, and compliance, the kind of synthesis a fractional COO would do. | | Margin synthesizer (full run) | 200 | Sonnet | Canonical chart-of-accounts mapping plus leakage detection across every job in the period. | | Voice ingestion session (~5 min) | 50 | Sonnet | Speech-to-text, extraction, and normalization into your operating record. |

A final row, Opus override on high-stakes operations, is listed at 5x the operation's normal IU cost, run on the Opus model. This applies when a decision touches a regulatory deadline, a six-figure number, or a multi-source synthesis where a wrong answer stated confidently is unacceptable. Verinode routes to the stronger model automatically in those cases; you don't have to ask for it.

Under the table, one line sets the review cadence: "Cost table reviewed quarterly. Material changes go to the Operator Advisory Council before taking effect." Nothing on this table moves without that review, and any change is published, not applied quietly.

What consumes IUs and what Verinode absorbs

Right below the cost table, the page draws a hard line between work you're paying for and work Verinode funds as part of running your account.

Operator-funded (consumes IUs). Anything where you're actively directing the platform to act:

• Chat with an agent (every message)
• Action plan creation and execution
• Cross-section synthesis on demand
• Voice, photo, or email ingestion sessions
• Surveys you create
• Custom analyses and queries

Verinode-funded (no IU charge). Anything the platform does in the background on your behalf, absorbed as engagement spend rather than billed to you:

• Weekly margin synthesis briefings
• Daily signal scans on your data
• Real-time alerts when something changes
• Briefing newsletters
• Peer benchmark change notifications
• Homepage feed updates and "what's new for you" surfacing

In plain terms: data flowing in and Verinode watching it for you is free. Asking Verinode to act, decide, or dig deeper on demand spends IUs.

A highlighted line under both lists states the balance rule plainly: "AI actions pause when your balance reaches zero. We never auto-charge unless you opt in." There is no silent overage. If your balance runs out, operator-initiated AI work stops until you top up, upgrade, or opt in to auto-top-up (set up on the Billing page itself, off by default).

The pre-purchase calculator

Below the cost table sits the calculator, under the heading "Estimate your monthly IU spend." The idea: tell it how many of each operation you expect to run in a typical month, and it computes your total IU spend and projects the cost against each tier's included allotment and overage rate, so you can tell before you buy whether your included IUs cover you or whether you'll want a top-up habit.

Currency. A toggle in the top-right switches the whole calculator between USD and CAD.

The operation table. One row per operation (the same seven operations from the cost table above), with four columns:

• Operation, the label.
• Per use, the IU cost for one instance (matches the published table).
• Per month, a number field you type into: how many times you expect to run that operation in a month. Starts at 0 for every row.
• IU subtotal, that row's count times its per-use cost, recalculated live as you type.

A final row, Total IUs / month, sums every row's subtotal into one number.

Tier projections. Below the table, three cards, one per membership tier:

• Executive ($4,200/yr)
• Premier ($7,200/yr)
• Reserve ($12,000/yr)

Each card shows its Included IUs per month, then compares your typed-in total against that allotment:

• If your total is at or under the included allotment, the card reads "Covered by included allotment."
• If your total goes over, the card reads "Overage: [N] IUs at the tier PAYG rate," followed by the projected extra dollar cost per month ("≈ [amount] / mo on top of membership"), and a note that "A recurring monthly bundle would lower the per-IU rate. See pricing page for the discount table."

This is genuinely useful before you buy: type in your expected pace (say, 15 standard decisions and 40 chat turns a month) and see, tier by tier, whether you'd land inside the included allotment or need to budget for overage, and roughly how much.

How IUs translate into decisions and outcomes

The cost table tells you what an operation costs. Once you're using the product, Verinode never shows you a bare IU number without pairing it to something you'd actually recognize as work done. A few places this shows up:

The IU balance chip, in the agent panel header, shows your current balance alongside its outcome equivalent, for example: "About 16 decisions or 160 conversations left. At your pace, lasts about 3 weeks." Clicking it opens your spend log.

Adding capacity (the top-up flow) shows the same translation before you buy: "You have [N] IU, about [X] decisions or [Y] conversations," and each bundle size previews how many decisions or conversations it buys.

Confirming a spend that would draw down your balance shows how many decisions your current balance covers, and how many it would cover after the spend, so a big action's cost is never just a number in isolation.

Three exchange-rate anchors sit behind these translations, deliberately round so they're easy to hold in your head:

• 1 decision = 30 IU. This is the canonical Standard decision, the default fractional-COO output: an action title, a monthly loss figure, a consequence headline, and a plan.
• 1 deep dive = 15 IU. A Deep (Opus-routed) analysis, or a single specialist agent call.
• 1 conversation = 3 IU. One Standard chat turn with an agent.

Cheap, routine operations like the cert/safety quick check don't count toward these "decision" or "conversation" totals. They're bucketed separately as quick actions, work Verinode does that's real but small enough that counting it against your "how many decisions did I get" sense of value would understate what a decision or a conversation actually costs.

Runway. Wherever your balance is shown, Verinode also projects how long it lasts at your recent pace: a plain label like "about 3 weeks," "about 5 days," or, if your usage is light relative to your balance, "plenty this month." If your balance is at zero, it reads "empty." The projection caps at 60 days so a barely-used account doesn't get an implausible "lasts 400 days" line.

If you have no usage history yet. New members haven't generated a spend pattern for Verinode to project from. In that case, Settings and the balance chip ask you to state your expected pace instead, in plain language: "Now and then" (a few decisions a week), "Most weeks" (part of your routine), or "All in" (across your whole operation). Whichever you pick translates into an expected monthly IU number and tells you, in decisions, whether your membership's included allotment covers it or whether you'd add a few more most months. This is the same starting-point logic as the pre-purchase calculator, just phrased as a pace instead of a per-operation count.

Why costs are published, not computed live

The design choice underneath all of this: your per-operation cost is fixed and public, not a variable pass-through of Verinode's own AI provider bill. That decoupling means:

• You can check the table yourself and know exactly what a standard decision or a vendor specialist call costs before you run one.
• A change in what Verinode pays its model providers never shows up as a surprise charge on your account. Any change to the published table itself goes through a quarterly review, and material changes go to the Operator Advisory Council before they take effect.
• The calculator's projections are real projections you can hold Verinode to, not a rough estimate that could drift once you're actually using the product.

Empty states

Loading balance. On /account/billing, before your IU status has loaded, the balance section reads simply "Loading balance…"

Contributor plan (no paid tier). If you're on the Contributor plan, the balance section does not show a numeric IU meter. 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 → link into the pricing comparison.

Calculator with nothing typed in. Every operation row starts at 0 per month, so the Total IUs / month row reads 0 and every tier card shows "Covered by included allotment." until you type in real expected counts.

Related reading

• Understanding your margin
• How benchmarks work
• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• Connecting your data