Member status & standing

What Member status is

Your tier (Contributor, Executive, or Premier) is what you pay for. Member status sits on top of that and is earned: a four-rank ladder, Pioneer, Ranger, Captain, Commander, plus two honors that run alongside it, Founder and Trustee. Rank cannot be bought. It moves only as your tenure as a paid Member, your data contributions, and the peers you bring into the network add up over time.

Status exists because a data trust gets more valuable the longer an operator stays in it and the more real data it contributes. Every rank you hold pays out in bonus Intelligence Units (IU) each month, on top of your tier's included allotment, in the same currency you already spend every week on decisions. Verinode does not decide when you're promoted in any subjective sense: it reads your own tenure, contribution, and referral numbers on a periodic sweep and moves you up the ladder the moment you clear a rung.

Where to find it

Open Settings from the sidebar. Two entry points show your standing:

• The Membership & Billing page (/settings/membership) shows your earned status seals and, if you hold one, your regional or identity badges, in a panel beside your Membership card.
• The Status row, under the Membership group in Settings, opens the full ladder at /settings/status. The row's own value previews your standing at a glance, for example "Ranger · +225 IU/mo" if you've earned Ranger, or "Become a Member" if you're still a Contributor.

The rest of this article walks the /settings/status page top to bottom.

Your current rank

At the top of the page, your current status seal renders large next to:

• Your status, your rank label: Pioneer, Ranger, Captain, or Commander.
• "+[N] IU every month, earned", in copper, the exact bonus of Intelligence Units your current rank adds to your monthly allotment.
• A short paragraph underneath explaining what the rank means. This is written as an honor, not a checklist, so a rank you haven't reached yet still reads as something worth reaching for.

If you're a Contributor and haven't become a Member yet, this hero reads "Pioneer from day one" instead, with "+[N]% capacity, every month" underneath, and an explanation that every Member starts as a Pioneer and earns bonus capacity from the first month, then climbs from there. A Become a Member button sits below it.

The status ladder, rank by rank

| Rank | What it takes | Meaning | Monthly bonus | |---|---|---|---| | Pioneer | 6+ months as a paid Member | "The founding cohort of the trust. Your name is in the original ledger of this network." | +10% of your tier's monthly IU allotment | | Ranger | 12+ months, plus 25+ data contributions | "The operators whose data is making every member's benchmarks sharper, month after month." | +15% | | Captain | 24+ months, plus 100+ contributions, plus 1 referral | "Operators others follow. Years of contribution, real-world results, and the peers you brought into the network with you." | +20% | | Commander | 36+ months, plus 250+ contributions, plus 3 referrals, plus a complete company profile | "The most senior rank in the trust. Commanders set the standard the rest of the network builds toward." | +25% |

Each rank's bonus is a percentage of your tier's monthly IU allotment (Executive, Premier, or Reserve), not a flat number, so the same rank is worth more bonus IU on a larger membership. There is a small legacy flat floor underneath the percentage so the bonus is never trivial, but in practice the percentage of your allotment is what you'll see.

Every rank also carries a real perk beyond IU: Pioneer earns a permanent listing in the Member directory, Ranger adds priority support, Captain adds a complimentary Advisory session each year and early access to new capabilities, and Commander adds four complimentary Advisory sessions a year and a standing invitation to help shape the platform's direction.

What counts toward each number

• Tenure is measured from the date of your first paid subscription. If you don't have one on record yet, it falls back to when your operator account was created. Tenure is per operator business, not per person: if several people share a membership, everyone sees the same tenure and the same rank.
• Data contributions count documents you've contributed to the network that were successfully ingested, not every upload attempt. Duplicate uploads and uploads blocked by abuse or rate-limit checks don't count. See Forwarding documents and Connecting your data for the ways contributions flow in.
• Referrals count peers you've brought onto the platform, attributed to anyone on your membership, not just the person who sent the invite.
• Complete profile, the Commander requirement, means your Company Profile has your service model and your operating region filled in. See Company profile for that form.

Progress toward the next rung

Below the hero, unless you're already Commander, an accent panel shows the rank you're climbing toward:

• The next rank's seal and label, tagged Next rank.
• Its bonus, "+[N]% capacity, every month."
• A progress bar for every requirement that applies to that rank:

- Tenure, in months. Shown as "have / need" (for example "8 / 12 months") until you clear it, then the bar turns green with a checkmark. - Contributions, your lifetime count so far against the number the next rank needs. Only shown for ranks that require a contribution count. - Referrals, only shown for ranks that require at least one. - Complete profile, shown as a binary row reading Done or Not yet instead of a bar, only for ranks that require it.

• A line at the bottom, "Also unlocks:", spelling out the next rank's perks in plain language.

A bar filling to 100% doesn't promote you instantly. Verinode evaluates status on a periodic sweep rather than the moment a threshold is crossed, so a fully met bar means the next sweep picks up the promotion.

Once you reach Commander, this panel is replaced with a closing line: "Commander.", followed by Commander's perks, since there's no next rung above it.

The Order: every seal, always on screen

Under the progress panel, The Order lays all four ladder seals side by side so the whole climb is visible at once, not just the rank ahead of you:

• Ranks you've reached, including your current one, render in full color.
• Your current rank carries a You are here pill.
• Ranks you've already passed show a checkmark before their name.
• Ranks above your current one render dimmed, with reduced saturation, visible but clearly not reached yet.
• Every seal shows its bonus percentage underneath (for example "+15% capacity"), and non-current ranks also show their earned-criteria line in small muted text.

If you're viewing the Contributor teaser, every seal in The Order renders dimmed, since none are earned yet.

Parallel honors: Founder, Trustee, Advisor

Beneath The Order, an Honors section appears only if you hold at least one of these. They run alongside your rank rather than replacing it: a Captain who is also a Founder holds both seals at once.

• Founder. "The first 100 Members made the trust real. A permanent designation in the history of how this network got built." Founder is historic: it was granted once, to the first cohort of paid Members, and isn't something newly earned going forward. It carries a lifetime $6,000/yr Premier price lock, an annual Founder summit, direct access to the Verinode team, and a permanent bonus of +30% of your monthly allotment.
• Trustee. "The operator-advocates who carry the trust forward. You tell other operators why this matters, and the network keeps growing because of it." Trustee is earned through active referrals and sustained engagement, and it's re-earned annually rather than kept forever once earned. It carries an annual summit with the Verinode team, content collaboration, and the same +30% monthly bonus as Founder.
• Advisor. "Operators whose counsel shapes the trust's data-use policy. Appointed seats on the Operator Advisory Council." This is a Council seat: it's appointed, evaluated separately from the tenure-and-contribution ladder, and shows up on your status page only when your account carries that appointment. Holding an Advisor seat is a recognition of your voice on the Council; it does not by itself add a bonus IU percentage the way Founder and Trustee do.

Each honor shows its own seal, label, and a short line describing what it recognizes.

Regional and identity badges

Alongside your status seals on Membership & Billing (/settings/membership), a Your badges panel can show up to a few additional recognitions that sit outside the rank ladder entirely:

• A country badge (United States, Canada, or United Kingdom), auto-assigned from the country and region on your Company Profile. It updates automatically if your company's country changes, and only one country badge shows at a time.
• Veteran, self-declared. You turn this on yourself in your personal account settings with a simple toggle labeled "I am a veteran," described as: "Self-declared. We honor your service and assign a Veteran badge on your profile. We do not use a third-party identity service to verify this, we trust your word."
• RIA Member, recognizing active membership in the Restoration Industry Association. This one is granted rather than self-declared.

These badges are recognition, not rank: they don't add bonus IU and they don't move you up the status ladder. They're a separate way Verinode acknowledges who you are and where you operate.

How rank and bonus IU are actually calculated

• Rank belongs to the operator business, not to an individual person. If your membership has several people on it, everyone sees the same rank, because tenure, contributions, and referrals are all counted at the operator level.
• Bonus IU is a percentage of your tier's monthly allotment, so the same rank pays more bonus capacity on a Premier membership than on Executive, since it's a share of a larger monthly pool. Founder and Trustee always pay at least as much bonus as your ladder rank alone would, whichever is higher applies, they never stack additively with your rank's own bonus.
• Bonus IU lands in a separate bucket that refreshes every month alongside your tier's included allotment. Like your included IUs, unused bonus IU does not carry over month to month.
• Rank only applies to paid Members. Contributors see the teaser experience across the Membership & Billing panel, the Status row, and the full Status page, since there's no earned rank yet, only a preview of what becomes available once you become a Member.

If you're not a Member yet

Contributors see the same visual ladder with everything still ahead of them. The hero reads "Pioneer from day one", the bonus line reads "+25 IUs / month from day one," and The Order shows all four seals dimmed. A Become a Member button opens the plan picker. This button is suppressed when the page already carries an upgrade ask elsewhere on screen (for example, next to the Membership card), so you're never shown the same prompt twice.

Best-practice example

Say you're a Ranger, 14 months in, with 40 contributions and no referrals yet. Your next-rank panel shows Captain, with a Tenure bar at "14 / 24 months," a Contributions bar at "40 / 100," and a Referrals bar at "0 / 1." The fastest move here isn't waiting out the calendar, it's a single referral: send one peer your invite link from Settings: Referrals, and the Referrals bar clears immediately, leaving tenure and contributions as the only remaining climbs.

Empty states, verbatim

• Contributor, Status row value on the Settings home page: "Become a Member."
• Contributor, full Status page hero: "Pioneer from day one," with the Pioneer meaning line, followed by "From there the order climbs as you contribute and bring peers in."
• At Commander, in place of the next-rank panel: "Commander." followed by Commander's perks description.
• No Honors held: the Honors section does not render at all, rather than showing an empty placeholder.

Data sources