Verno Foundation

Verno is run by the Verno Foundation, based in the Netherlands.

Why a foundation

What gets built here is a shared record: people's work, linked to other people's work, meant to still be readable in ten years. That is a bad fit for something that has to be sold when the money runs out, and a worse fit for something owned by whoever pays most for it.

A foundation is not a guarantee of good behaviour. It is a structure that makes the wrong decision harder to take.

How it pays for itself

Two kinds of cost, and they behave very differently.

Generating an image, a video or a spoken recording costs real money per item, paid to the companies that run those models. That is what credits are for: you buy credits, you spend them when you generate something, and the price you pay is tied to what it actually costs us.

Everything else is carried by Verno. Suggesting moments, filling in a date, sorting a timeline into a category, writing a description — all of that is AI too, and all of it is free to you. It costs us less per use, and charging for it would make the site tedious to build in.

No advertising. We do not sell your work, and we do not sell data about you. If Verno ever needs another source of income, it will be written here before it is introduced.

Where a euro goes. A hundred credits cost € 3.50, VAT included. Of that, about sixty cents is VAT and about sixty-five cents goes to the payment service — they charge a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction, and that fixed amount weighs heavily on a small package. What is left covers the models that make the image, and the servers.

That is why the smallest package is not smaller: below three euros, more goes to the paying than to the making.

Payment runs through Polar, who is the seller for that transaction and accounts for the VAT in dozens of countries. That is work a foundation this size cannot do itself, and it also means your name, address and card details stay with them and never arrive here.

What we intend to publish

Working out the pricing meant working out the real cost per image, per video, per minute of speech. We want that to be public — not a marketing page, but the actual numbers, kept up to date as they move. It is not there yet; when it is, it will be linked from this page.

Contact

info@verno.foundation — for anything that needs a person.