Onboarding stipends for new franchisees

What this is

An onboarding stipend is a one-time gift of 5,000 Intelligence Units (IU) your network gives a brand-new franchisee membership so they can start putting Verinode IQ's AI features to work before they've bought a paid membership of their own. It draws from a dedicated reserve your network admin funds ahead of time, it is issued once per franchisee, and it lands directly in that franchisee's own account as immediately usable IUs, not a shared pool the whole network draws against.

Think of it as move-in money: the franchisee doesn't have to decide whether IQ is worth paying for before they've had a real chance to use it. The stipend removes that friction for the first couple of months, then their own membership tier takes over.

This sits inside the broader IU sponsorship system alongside the network pool (which covers the gap when a franchisee's own balance falls short on a live AI call). The stipend reserve is a separate, ring-fenced bucket from that pool, set aside specifically for onboarding.

Where to find it

Open Settings from the HQ sidebar, then the Sponsorship tab (admin-only, alongside Team, Billing, and Developer). This is where your network's whole IU economy lives: current balances, the fund/earmark actions, and a preview of recent activity.

For the complete transaction record, click See full history → at the top of the Recent Activity panel, which takes you to the full ledger at hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship. Every viewer can read this page; only admins see the funding controls.

On the Settings hub itself, before you open the Sponsorship tab, an IU Pool tile summarizes your network's spendable total at a glance. If nothing has been funded yet, it reads "Fund the network pool / Sponsors franchisee AI work when their own IU balance falls short." Once funded, it shows the spendable total with a breakdown line like "Spendable · 40,000 pool · 5,000 earmarked" when a stipend reserve balance exists. Either way, clicking the tile opens the Sponsorship tab directly.

Current Balances: where the reserve sits

The Sponsorship tab's Current Balances section shows four figures side by side:

• Network pool: Sponsors franchisee AI calls. The shared bucket franchisees draw from when their own balance can't cover a call.
• Prepaid: Stripe one-time purchases (Phase 1b+). A separate bucket for direct network purchases.
• Stipend reserve: Earmarked for onboarding grants. This is the bucket the onboarding stipend draws from.
• Spendable total: Pool + prepaid. Notice the stipend reserve is deliberately left out of this figure: it's earmarked money, not money the network pool can spend on an ordinary sponsored AI call. It only ever moves in one direction, out to a newly onboarded franchisee's own account.

If your network has an active recurring IU subscription, a line beneath the balances reads "Recurring refill: N IU per cycle" with a next-refill date. Without one, it reads "No active recurring subscription. Fund the pool manually below or wire a Stripe subscription via K-HQ-S7-BILLING." That message is about the shared pool's monthly refill, not the stipend reserve, which is always funded manually.

The three eligibility gates

Before any stipend is credited, Verinode checks three things about the franchisee, in order. All three have to pass, or the grant doesn't go through:

1. 1Network membership. The franchisee has to already be a recognized member of your network. If they aren't, the grant is rejected with "Operator is not a member of this network."
2. 2Contributing tier. The franchisee's current membership tier has to be the free Contributor tier, not a paid tier. The stipend exists to bootstrap franchisees who haven't purchased a membership yet; a franchisee already on a paid tier doesn't qualify, and the rejection reads "Onboarding stipend is for contributing-tier operators only." If the franchisee's tier can't be determined at all, the message reads "Operator's tier could not be resolved" instead.
3. 3No prior grant. Each franchisee can receive exactly one onboarding stipend from your network, ever. If one has already been issued to this franchisee, the grant is rejected with "This franchisee has already received an onboarding stipend."

Funding the stipend reserve

The stipend reserve doesn't fund itself. A network admin has to earmark IUs into it ahead of time, the same way they'd fund the shared pool, just into a different bucket.

1. 1In the Sponsorship tab, find the Fund Pool or Earmark Stipends section (admin-only; non-admins see "Only network admins can fund the pool or earmark stipends." instead).
2. 2Locate the Earmark stipend reserve card. Its hint reads: "Reserved for one-time onboarding stipends to new contributing-tier franchisees."
3. 3Enter a whole number of IUs (the field accepts a placeholder example like 50000). Only positive whole numbers are accepted.
4. 4Optionally add a note, for example "Q3 FY2026 sponsorship top-up," useful for your own internal accounting record of why the earmark happened.
5. 5Click Fund (it reads "Funding…" while the request is in flight). On success, a confirmation reads "Earmarked N IU for onboarding stipends," and the Stipend reserve balance updates immediately.

The neighboring Fund network pool card works the same way but credits the shared pool bucket instead. The two buckets never mix: money earmarked for stipends never gets pulled into an ordinary sponsored AI call, and money funded into the shared pool never covers an onboarding stipend.

How the stipend bootstraps a new franchisee

Once a network admin grants the stipend to a specific new franchisee, and all three gates above pass, two things happen at once:

• Your network's stipend reserve balance goes down by the stipend amount (5,000 IU by default).
• The franchisee's own account balance goes up by the same amount, credited as IUs they can spend immediately on their own AI work in IQ, no separate activation step on their end.

The stipend doesn't expire at the end of a billing cycle the way a paid membership's monthly allotment resets. It stays available in the franchisee's account until they actually use it, so a new franchisee who signs up mid-month doesn't lose any of it to a reset a few weeks later. In practice, 5,000 IU is meant to give a new franchisee real runway, typically a couple of months of active use of IQ's AI features, before they'd need to rely on any IUs of their own.

A network admin can adjust the stipend amount for an individual grant away from the 5,000 default if your network wants to sponsor a particular franchisee more generously, though 5,000 is the standard starting point for every new membership.

Reading it in the ledger

Every stipend grant shows up as a row in your network's ledger, visible both in the Recent Activity preview on the Sponsorship tab and in the full history at hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship.

On the full history page, look for:

• The Stipend reserve hero stat at the top ("Earmarked for onboarding").
• Two all-time totals further down: Stipend earmarked (everything your network has ever put into the reserve, shown in green) and Onboarding granted (everything your network has ever paid out as stipends, shown in red).
• Individual rows in the Ledger table with Reason "Onboarding stipend grant," Bucket "Stipend reserve," the receiving franchisee's name under Operator, and a negative Delta (the amount debited from your reserve to fund that franchisee's grant).

Before your network has funded anything, both the Recent Activity preview and the full ledger show the same reassurance: "No pool activity yet. Once you fund the pool, every grant, draw and refund shows up here" (Settings preview) or "No pool activity yet. Once the pool is funded the first time, every grant, draw and refund shows up here" (full history page).

Related help articles

• /help/hq-sponsorship-network-iu-pool: the shared network pool that covers franchisee AI calls day to day
• /help/hq-sponsorship-ledger-history: the full transaction history behind every grant, draw, refill, and refund
• /help/hq-membership-tiers: Contributor, Executive, and Premier, and what changes for a franchisee at each tier
• /help/hq-overview: what HQ is and how its sections fit together

Data sources