North is a piece of software that does the commercial half of a freelance project. You paste the notes from a client call. It drafts a scoped project, three priced options with the arithmetic showing, and a proposal. The contract is drafted alongside and shown to the client after they accept. The client reads, accepts, signs and eventually pays in a private room that carries your name rather than ours. Invoices are drafted, sent and tracked, and you are told when things happen. You send everything yourself.
That is the whole product. This page is mostly here to say what is around it.
Who it is for
Visual freelancers first: brand and identity designers, UI/UX and web designers, illustrators, photographers. That is the field the person building North came from, and it is the field the drafting was tuned against, so the proposals it writes know what a revision round is and that usage rights are a line item.
If you are independent in some other trade, most of it still applies. The machinery of a client project (scope, terms, deposit, invoice, the twenty-two days between "looks great" and the money arriving) does not care what the deliverable is. What you will miss is the discipline-specific reading, and the pages for each trade are where that lives.
Who is making it
One person. North is built by a solo founder who has spent his working life on the visual side of client work, and the first user of the software is the person building it. That is a smaller team than the tools you are comparing it with, and it is worth knowing before you decide anything.
It cuts both ways. The product has opinions, because one person's opinions are what it is made of: that the deposit does more work than the contract, that a price with its reasoning on the page is a different object from a price, that nothing should reach your client without your hand on it. It also means there is no support department. The address at the bottom of every page goes to a person who reads it.
Where it stands
In beta. Everything is free while it is, and there is no card to enter.
There are no customers yet. You will not find a testimonial on this site, a "trusted by" strip, or a count of proposals sent, because none of those things exist, and the ones you see elsewhere are frequently invented. When somebody says something about North that we did not ask them to say, it will appear here with their name on it. Until then, the software has to make its own case.
The terms and the privacy policy are written in plain language and labelled as not yet reviewed by a lawyer. That review is the next thing on the list. Until it is done, both pages say so at the top rather than pretending.
What it is not
Not a CRM. Not a scheduler. Not time tracking. Not bookkeeping. Not a project-management board your client has to log into. The all-in-one tools do those things, some of them well, and the comparisons say so with the prices attached.
It will also never be a marketplace. There is no version of North where companies browse freelancers, where you are ranked against the person next to you, or where North takes a percentage of the work. The moment a tool sells you to the people who hire you, it stops working for you, and that is the one line this product is built on.
The thing underneath
Most of the anxiety in independent work is not the work. It is not knowing three numbers on a Tuesday afternoon: what has been agreed, what is owed, and what has actually arrived. Salaried people get those numbers for free, every month, from someone else. Freelancers are expected to reconstruct them from a folder of PDFs and a bank app.
North is an attempt to make that visibility ordinary. Not more projects, not a bigger pipeline, not motivation. Just a clear line from what you agreed to what you were paid, that you can read at a glance and that your client can read too.
Questions, corrections, or something we got wrong on this page: hello@asknorth.com.