September 7, 2026
Credits you can buy, and Verno on a phone
Buying credits
• Five packages, from 100 credits for € 3.50 to 1000 for € 35 — or an amount you pick yourself.
• The price on the button is what you pay. VAT included.
• Every package costs the same per credit. No subscriptions, nothing renews.
• Pay in euros, dollars or pounds.
• A quiet warning when you are running low, and by email if you want one.
On a phone
• Upright: swipe through a timeline, and add a moment anywhere.
• Sideways: watch it play, full screen.
• Sources and branches now show in both.
Speed
• The Atlas opens fast, and starts at the present.
• Pages no longer load images and video you never see.
• Verno moved next to its database. Every click waits less.
Real, what-if, fiction or future
• Every timeline and every moment now says which of the four it is.
• Only future carries sources: a prediction can be argued for. Fiction cannot.
Mail from Verno
• Sign-in and password mails are ours now, and in your language.
• Forgotten your password: there is a link again.
• Pick a language without an account.
And
• Your own profile picture, in a frame you earn with badges.
• Choose the language Verno writes in, per timeline and per story.
• Reports get a reference number and a confirmation by email.
• One confirmation window for anything that costs credits.
August 29, 2026
Verno without an account
Until today you needed an account to see anything at all. Not to make something — to look. That was never the intention, and it is over.
Everything public is now actually public
Twenty public timelines sat behind a sign-in screen. A link someone shared landed on a login form. The rule that did that was written for the settings and the admin pages, but it covered the whole app, and so it covered the catalogue too.
Now what is set to public can be read by anyone: timelines, stories, the Atlas, Meanwhile, and this page. Listening to a recording works without an account as well. Private and shared stay exactly as private and shared as they were — the database decides that, not the page, and nothing about that changed.
The front page shows the work
Logged out you used to get a pitch explaining what Verno is. That made sense while there was nothing to see without an account. Now it is the wrong way round, so the front page shows the catalogue to everyone, and the explanation moved to "What is Verno" at the top of the menu at the bottom of every page.
It also means signing out arrives somewhere. Before, it left you at a closed door.
Makers have their names back
Logged out, sixteen timelines each said "by unknown". That was the database doing its job: profiles are private by default, so a visitor without an account may not read them. Correct, and indistinguishable from an empty database.
Publishing happens under a name. If you set a timeline to public, your name is on it — that is where credit comes from, and it is the only way anyone can find the rest of your work. Setting your profile to private keeps your profile closed; it does not make your work anonymous. Nothing else about you is shared: not your email, not your language, not your role.
The list of timelines can be searched properly
Every row now says who made it, with a link to that person. Alongside the moments, branches, images and videos it also counts the stories and the recordings, and the filter for those can pick out timelines that have them.
There is a new filter for region. It works on the moments, not on the timeline, so a timeline shows up as soon as one moment happens in the region you picked — a timeline about the Silk Road belongs under Central Asia even when its centre of gravity lies elsewhere. You can pick several at once.
Source reliability is visible now. Sorting on it already existed, but you could not see what you were sorting by.
And the default order changed. It sorted by date, which put a timeline five minutes old with two empty moments above a finished one with thirty. Now the fullest come first — the same measure the ribbon on the front page uses.
Moving moments
Moments were reordered with two small arrows, one moment at a time. Now there is one window with the whole order in it, and you drag a moment to where it belongs. It works with the keyboard as well.
What is not finished stays out of the shop window
Some timelines were put down by Verno itself, where a gap in the catalogue showed. They are invitations: nobody has been through them, and they are free for anyone to pick up.
They no longer appear on the front page. Between work people actually made, they read as a recommendation, which is the one thing they are not. On the list of timelines they are easy to find on purpose — that is where you go to adopt one — with a switch for all, owned, or unclaimed.
Signing in when you want to make something
Looking needs no account; making does. Two buttons handled that differently: "What if…?" jumped straight to the sign-in screen, and "Tell the story" opened its window and showed a red line saying you were not signed in, with nowhere to go from there.
Both now open the same window, say why it will not work, and offer the two ways in. Creating an account comes first, because most people who end up there do not have one yet.
Also: the favourite star moved from under the thumbnail to behind the title, which gives every row back a line of space. Rows on the front page fit four across instead of three. And a handful of Dutch words that were still sitting in the English interface have been translated.
August 28, 2026
Stories you can listen to, and Verno in four languages
A story could be read. Now it can be listened to as well — and Verno itself speaks four languages.
Have your story read aloud
On every story there is now a button to have it recorded. Not a robot reading a page out, but a performance: thirty voices, and you choose what the recording is for. Read aloud, told as a podcast, or laid under video — the same text is delivered differently each time. That steers how it sounds, not what it says.
Verno looks at the story first and then suggests which voices fit. Not only the person telling it, but also what is being told: an eyewitness who does not know how it ends needs a different voice from a documentary narrator. All thirty stay available, so a suggestion is a suggestion.
A recording is made in pieces, with the progress visible while it runs. That matters for a long story: you see how far it is instead of staring at a screen that says nothing. Intro and outro are their own pieces, so the maker is named at the start and not only at the end. And the seam between two pieces is closed audibly — earlier you could hear the joins.
You pay for what came out
A recording is charged on its measured length, not on an estimate beforehand. That was the other way round, and an estimate is always wrong in one of two directions. Recordings that got stuck now close themselves off properly and give the credits back; before, they ate them.
A scene is no longer a moment
When a story is written, the model now plans first and takes moments together where they belong together. Before, every moment became its own scene, whether it earned one or not. That is why a story reads more evenly now, and why a section no longer opens without an opening line.
Sharper images, and faster
Every image now has one fixed address and is delivered at the size actually shown on screen. A thumbnail no longer pulls down a full-size image. The first image on a page comes with the HTML the server sends, so it is there before anything else has loaded, and the balloon in the Atlas fetches its picture at balloon size.
Waiting, made visible
Every AI action now shows that it is busy and roughly how long it takes. A spinner that says nothing is indistinguishable from something broken.
Verno speaks four languages
The whole shell is in English: buttons, menus, messages, the Atlas, and the addresses in the bar at the top. What people wrote themselves has been translated once as well, so timelines and moments read the same way.
And English is no longer the only option. Verno now also speaks Dutch, German and Spanish. You pick your language when you create an account — your browser makes the first guess — and you can change it whenever you like under Profile.
That setting covers Verno itself: buttons, menus and messages. It does not translate what people write. A timeline written in Dutch stays in Dutch, whichever language you read Verno in. Translating someone else’s words is a different question, and not one to answer by accident.
Also: Timelines has its own icon, What if…? has the branch on its side, and the text above a title stayed light where the halo behind it was already dark.
August 22, 2026
Space probes, and an Earth that is right again
Yesterday Discovery went into space. Today something we sent that way goes with it, and three things that were wrong have been put right.
Eight probes on their way
Under Layers there is a new switch: Space probes. It holds Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, New Horizons, Parker Solar Probe, Cassini and Juno — five that are leaving the solar system, one that is diving towards the sun, and two missions with a beginning and an end.
To watch them fly there is the Spaceflight button by the time bar. All of spaceflight falls within a hair's breadth on the ordinary bar: a hundred and fifty years on an axis of four and a half billion. That button stretches the span from 1955 to 2030 across the whole bar. Press play afterwards and the probes leave one by one, trailing their paths behind them. In 1977 the two Voyagers depart just after each other, in 1979 they both swing around Jupiter, and after that one goes on past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune while the other shoots up out of the plane. One step out shows the rest of the journey, up to 2100.
The dots on the path are the flybys. That is where the orbit bends, because that is where a planet's gravity slung the probe on to the next one. Their names appear as soon as the time bar stands close by.
Why this works differently
A planet, a moon or a comet follows an orbit that a handful of numbers pin down; from those Verno works out every date itself. A probe does not. Voyager 2 was slung onto a different orbit at Jupiter, at Saturn and at Uranus, so no single calculation covers the whole journey. These are therefore stored positions from NASA/JPL's Horizons: where the probe was, per date, close together where the orbit bends and far apart on the straight stretches.
That also means it stops somewhere. JPL calculates up to 2100 for the Voyagers and up to 2050 for the Pioneers and New Horizons. After that they fly on, but we no longer know where to — and then we would rather not draw it.
The Earth is right again
In the view where you zoom in on the Earth, the surface was wrong. It showed the wrong map, on which narrow seas such as the Mediterranean had silted up. And it was mirrored, and upside down.
That last one came from somewhere nobody could see: the whole solar system view looked up from below the Earth's orbit, and from there the north pole is at the bottom. With orbits you do not notice — an ellipse upside down is the same ellipse — but as soon as the Earth showed its own continents, there was finally something on screen by which up could be told from down. All three fixed.
The view now also opens on the sunlit side, running with the clock. Before, the camera stood at a fixed angle in space, and whether that was the day or the night side depended on the date. On the wrong day you opened onto a black sphere.
The scale under the time bar
The years under the bar stood at equal distances from each other instead of in their own place. Because "4.54 billion years ago" is far wider than "2026", one label pushed the other aside and the slider stood to the left of the year it pointed at. Now each year gets the place where the slider stands when it points there.
Putting a moment off Earth yourself
Verno already filled in by itself whether a moment leaves the Earth. If it got that wrong — and it does, because a launch is on Earth while the flight after it is not — there was no way back. Now you choose it yourself: on a new event, on the suggestions before saving, and when editing an existing event.
Along with that a fault surfaced that had been in there longer. If you edited an event, it lost its place on the map: correct a typo in the title and the pin disappeared. That no longer happens.
August 21, 2026
Discovery goes into space: the solar system, the moon and the night sky
Discovery had three ways of looking: the globe, the flat map and Meanwhile. Two more have joined them, and those look away from the Earth.
The solar system
At the top there is a new button with a sun on it. There the eight planets stand in their real place in their orbit, on the year shown at the bottom of the time bar. Slide the time and they move along, each at its own pace: Mercury runs, Neptune barely gets anywhere. Drag to look across it at an angle.
The distances are compressed, and they had to be: at true scale Mercury sticks to the sun and Neptune falls off the screen. So the order is right, the proportions are not. Further back than five thousand years only the orbits remain — where a planet stood in its orbit back then can no longer be worked out, and then we would rather not draw it.
The space around the Earth
Click the Earth and you drop one scale deeper. There the Earth is the centre, with the moon in its real place, in its real phase, and the path it covers in a month. The lit side points to the sun. Bottom left shows how the moon looks from the ground that day.
Here the day counts and not the year, because the moon goes round in just over twenty-seven days. That is why there is a day slider at the bottom.
Zoom in and you see what people have hung around the Earth: over sixteen thousand objects, with the geostationary ring as a great circle around them. Starlink, the navigation satellites, the ISS, Hubble and the Chinese space station are all there, and you can switch them on and off by kind. Slide the time back and the shell empties: in 1965 five were floating there.
Two things about that are not right, and the screen says so too. Where an object stands exactly along its orbit is the position of one day — it goes round once every hour and a half. And you only see what still goes round today; what has fallen back is not there any more, so the sixties look emptier than they were.
The night sky
Another button: nearly nine thousand stars, everything the naked eye picks up on a dark night, with the lines of the eighty-eight constellations running through them. And the seven wanderers: the sun, the moon with its phase, and the planets. Those move among the fixed stars, always along the same band — the zodiac is named after it.
This is the view where the time bar does the most. The Earth wobbles once around its axis in just over twenty-five thousand years, and that changes the pole star. Now it is Polaris, less than a degree from the celestial pole. Slide to 2800 BC and Thuban stands there — the same star the shaft in the Great Pyramid is aimed at. Go forward and Alderamin takes over, later Deneb and Vega.
Go further back still and it stops, and the screen says so. The stars you see now were not there then, and their motion can only be calculated forward for a while.
Moments off Earth
A moment can now belong to a celestial body instead of to a place on the map. Set up a timeline about spaceflight and the moon landing ends up at the moon, a Mars mission at Mars and a space station in orbit around the Earth. Verno fills that in by itself when you make an event.
Where it comes from
The planetary orbits come from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lunar position from the Astronomical Almanac, the stars from the HYG catalogue, the constellation lines from d3-celestial and the satellites from CelesTrak. Every view has a note on the right telling you what is right and what is not.
August 21, 2026
Stories work again, and cost a good deal less
Having a story written went wrong: you started it, and what came back was only the title "Being written…". Text never arrived. The cause was in the status a new story began with — the system thought it was already finished and so never began. That is fixed, and the credits for stories that failed because of it have been refunded.
A good deal cheaper
We measured what writing a story actually costs, instead of estimating it. That turned out to be far below what we were charging for it. So the price is coming down: a story of ten moments with ten images cost 35 credits and now costs 14.
The price still moves with what you ask for. You pay for the timeline you have processed — how many moments go with it and how many images belong to them — and not for how many words come out. Untick moments and you see the price drop straight away.
August 21, 2026
Discovery: the world through time
There is a new screen: Discovery. A globe you can turn, with a time bar under it running from the forming of the Earth to today. Slide through time and the continents slide along — Pangaea breaks apart, the Atlantic opens, and your moments appear in the place where they lay back then. The Chicxulub impact does not stand where that place lies now, but where it lay sixty-six million years ago.
Three ways of looking
At the top you choose between the globe, the flat map and Meanwhile. Bottom right is a button that lets the Earth turn by itself; as soon as you drag, it stops.
Layers you can switch on and off
Left under the logo is a layer menu, split into The Earth, Nature and People. Nothing is on by default — you build up what you want to see yourself.
Under The Earth: satellite imagery, tectonic plates, the depth of the sea in five layers with the names of oceans and seas, the height of the land in five layers, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis with name and year, and sea level through the ice ages — switch that on and at low water the shallows fall dry and you walk from France to England.
Under Nature: forest, mountain ranges, deserts, steppes, highlands, basins, tundra, rivers and lakes, the great ocean currents, and Nature through time. That last one shows what the world looked like: at the peak of the last ice age Canada lies under ice, tundra reaches into France, the Amazon has shrunk and the Sahara is larger than now.
Under People: land borders through time, with fifty-three maps from long before our era to now, and over five thousand cities. A city appears when it comes into being, grows with its population and disappears when it is abandoned. A little clock beside a layer means that layer moves with the time bar.
Every view is a link
The state of the map is in the address: which moment in time, how far zoomed in, which way round, which layers and filters. Send that link on and the other person sees exactly the same. Your browser's back button works too.
What is real here
At the bottom of the panel is a note giving per layer where it comes from and how certain it is. Some things are measured, others are reconstructed, and you ought to be able to see that difference. The coastlines are fifteen real reconstructions, not a world map slid backwards. The ocean currents are a schematic, not a measurement. Nature through time comes from a climate model. It is all stated.
August 19, 2026
Stories: from your timeline to something to read aloud
You can now have a story written from a timeline. Not a summary and not a list, but one continuous text with a beginning, an arc and an ending — which happens to be about real moments.
You choose a style out of ten: from an eyewitness who does not know how it ends, to a documentary voice, a diary or a podcast. You choose a length, from short to read-aloud, and you can add a direction of your own ("skip the battles, I want to know how daily life changed"). You also decide which moments go in: untick some and the story gets shorter and cheaper.
While it is being written you see a waiting screen with a time estimate. After that the story stands on its own page, with the images of your moments in between, and appears in the archive where you can filter by style and length.
What is true stays true
The story does not invent moments and moves nothing in time. If a moment says its date is an estimate, it does not write an exact day. If the timeline itself is fiction or a What if, that is how it is told throughout — never as though it happened.
August 16, 2026
A home page that takes you somewhere, and a public profile
The home page has become the discovery page: a time ribbon as the front door, showing what there is to see instead of an empty greeting. For those not yet signed in, the landing page has been rebuilt, with real moments and real images from Verno itself — no examples that do not exist.
Public profile
Your profile now shows who you are, what you are working on and what you have made: your timelines in three kinds, your shared styles, your followers, and a table of the periods and continents your work takes place in.
Styles you share can now be favourited, and you see how often that has happened. You can also let go of a style of your own again.
Also: the credit history loads twenty-five rows at a time instead of everything at once, and the site has become noticeably faster because fixed parts are kept longer.
August 15, 2026
Branches as a tree, moving events, and the small print
Branches looked like a web of lines. Now it is a trunk with branches: you see at a glance where a timeline splits and where to. The branches sit closer to the event they come from and run the right way.
Moving events
If an event is in the wrong place in the order, you can now shift it one place forward or back. No more detour by way of the date.
The small print
Terms, privacy policy, cookie statement, code of conduct and the pages about the Verno Foundation are really there now, reachable through the mark at the bottom of every page.
August 14, 2026
What if…? — one moment, one other turning
Pick a moment from a timeline, change one thing, and show how it would have gone on. What if the Library of Alexandria had not burned down? What if the Spanish Armada had succeeded?
The result is its own kind of timeline — recognisable as a scenario, never as history — that stands beside the real outcome. Row by row you see where the two diverge, with the image alongside each moment. The model knows what it is departing from, so the scenario stays in conversation with what actually happened.
A scenario like that costs 10 credits and the first two images are included. The timeline is kept, so you can work it out further later or branch off it again.
August 13, 2026
Meanwhile: what was happening at the same time on the other side of the world
New screen: Meanwhile. From any event you look at the same period, but everywhere — parallel lanes per subject on one shared time axis. While the plague went round in Europe, something was also happening in West Africa, China and Mesoamerica, and here you see it side by side.
You can scroll through time, zoom in and out from a day to millions of years, and filter by region and subject. Click a card and you jump to that event in that other timeline. The state of the screen is in the address, so you can share a view.
Empty lanes are an invitation
If you see a lane without content, that is not a fault but a gap in what has been made so far. You can ask Verno to fill it in. If a timeline already exists that fits, its owner gets a suggestion instead of a second one appearing beside it. If it does not exist, an unclaimed timeline comes into being that anyone can claim and carry further.
Your own images are now stored privately as well: media from a private timeline can no longer be opened through a direct link.
August 12, 2026
Images and video are made in the background
Having an image or video made took up to several minutes, and you had to leave the tab open the whole time. That is no longer needed: generation runs in the background. Close your tab, carry on on your phone, come back tomorrow — the image is there.
You now also see roughly how long it takes, instead of a spinner that says nothing. If it takes longer than usual, the screen says that too. And a generation that really gets stuck is closed off properly, with your credits back.
August 9, 2026
Events: twenty-five free per timeline, and help filling them in
Creating events costs credits from now on, but only above a threshold: the first twenty-five events of a timeline are free. Above that, every three events cost one credit. You see the price before you have anything made.
Help with adding by hand
If you add an event yourself, Verno can write the description and the background for you from the title and the date. Handy when you know what happened but do not feel like typing it out.
Suggestions you dismiss stay gone
If you reject a suggested event, Verno remembers that and does not offer it again. And when something goes wrong with the AI you now get an explanation in plain language instead of a technical error code.
Inserting in the right place
Inserting an event between two existing events now keeps the order properly.
August 3, 2026
A quieter edit bar and better finding
A quieter edit bar on an event
The row of buttons had grown to ten on one line, with VIDEO running off the screen. Now two rows: event actions above, media actions below.
The three stars next to each other (event, image, video) are one again. Those were three database rows coming out as three buttons — an implementation detail that told the viewer nothing, certainly not when a video stood next to an image as well.
And edit mode is on by itself as soon as you have created your first events, instead of you having to go and find it.
Better finding
Discover now shows everything you are allowed to see, including your own private timelines — previously only other people's. There are filters for visibility and for media (images, video, no media), and two new sorts: best sourcing and most branches.
Searching for a link now looks in the description and the tags as well. Searching on title alone turned out to yield almost nothing in practice: a timeline called "Empires" did not come up for "Rome", while it is full of it.
August 2, 2026
Choose your own image quality, and tags that take you further
Image quality is now your choice
Until now one fixed AI model made all your images. From now on you choose between four levels, to be found under Credits:
Fast — 1 credit. Ready in seconds, fine while you are still building a timeline up.
Sharp — 7 credits. Follows your description far more closely; what is in your event is in the image.
Masterly — 15 credits. Richer light, more depth and material.
Sublime — 22 credits. The utmost we can deliver, for timelines where the image carries the story.
You do not choose from a list of model names but on what you see: nine example scenes, from a Romanesque abbey church under construction to an e-sports final, a deep-sea volcano and a generation ship by the Milky Way. Every scene has been made by all four models with exactly the same brief, so the difference you see is the model — not the description. Switch level and you stay on the same scene.
Because this determines what every following image costs, your choice is only applied once you confirm it. Everyone starts on Fast, and existing images do not change.
Playing is now a presentation
Press ▶ and the timeline goes full screen, without browser bars. Everything that does not belong to the story disappears: buttons, menus, arrows, icons. What remains is the image, the timeline itself, and per moment the kind, the title and the date. The shadow edges have been reduced too, so you see as much of the image as possible. Escape brings you back.
Tags take you further
The tag list under the timelines has been replaced by a search field that thinks along. Type and you get suggestions; if a tag only exists on another tab, it points you there instead of staying blank and going nowhere.
Click a tag and you now see Related: the tags that occur on the same timelines. By way of roman you get to greek, fashion and medieval — tags have become a way of browsing, not only of filtering.
When creating a timeline the AI now first looks at whether fitting tags already exist before it invents new ones. That way timelines about the same thing really do end up together.
Under the bonnet
New images are stored a good deal more compactly — about 24 times smaller than before, with no visible difference. That saves loading time, certainly on a slow connection.
August 1, 2026
Linking events to each other, one-way or both ways
A link can now point to a specific event of another timeline, not only to the timeline as a whole. When linking you choose what exactly to, and whether it should be one-way or both ways.
One-way puts the link on your timeline only — that is always allowed. Both ways makes it appear on the other person's timeline as well, and that goes as a request: the owner decides. Under Messages you see incoming requests, and you can withdraw an approval you gave earlier; the link then stays with the requester. If you would rather not receive such requests at all, you switch that off under Notification settings.
Verno's own suggestions now also point straight at the fitting event on the other side.
August 1, 2026
Verno suggests links itself
Verno now watches whether your timelines have common ground with other timelines, and then suggests a link. Switch edit mode on in your timeline: if there is a teal counter by the branch button, Verno has found something. Every suggestion comes with a short explanation of why those two belong together, so you can judge for yourself whether it holds. Linking or rejecting takes one click; if you reject something, it does not come back.
Open suggestions gather under Messages in your profile menu, with a counter so you do not miss them.
In settings, "Email settings" is now called "Notification settings". There you also switch the suggestions off if you would rather not have them — nothing is then calculated for you any more.
Also: "Review category" now fills in missing tags as well, the sliders in the app show their position correctly (the knob stayed on the left while the bar had already changed colour), and the scrollbars have been given the house style.
July 25, 2026
Reliability score and sourcing on events
Every event now shows a pie chart with a reliability score, based on real Wikipedia sources that actually support the event — not a shot in the dark, but grounded in what can really be found about it. Click the score for the underlying sources, including the text itself. As owner you can have events analysed again or add a source yourself.
July 25, 2026
Clearer generation status and adjustable visibility
You now see straight away whether an image or video is generating, with a clear notice at the bottom right of the screen — even if you go to another page in the meantime. You can now have several images or videos generated at once. On top of that you can change a timeline's visibility (private, shared, public) afterwards through the edit buttons.