What is North?

North is an AI partner for visual freelancers — branding and identity designers, web and product designers, illustrators, photographers. It does the commercial half of a project so that the person doing the craft does not have to become an administrator to get paid for it.

This page is a plain inventory rather than a pitch, partly because the previous version of it was wrong in two places for several months and that is worth not repeating.

What it does today

Turns a conversation into a scoped project. Paste the notes from a client call, however messy. North produces the deliverables with quantities, an explicit list of what is not included, and phases with dates.

Prices it, with the arithmetic visible. Tiered options anchored to what the outcome is worth to that client rather than to your hours, with the sums shown on the page instead of implied. This is the part it was built for, and the method behind it is a longer read.

Drafts the proposal and the agreement together. The contract is written alongside the proposal and revealed to the client immediately after they accept, so the terms arrive attached to the decision rather than as a separate hurdle a week later. E-signing is built in.

Gives the client somewhere to read it. A private deal room, carrying your name and colours rather than ours, where they read the proposal, sign, and later view the invoice and the finished work.

Flags scope changes. When a request goes past what was agreed, it says so, which is the moment at which the request is still easy to price.

Invoices, and chases. Invoices drafted, sent and tracked, with the moment a client opens one visible to you. Payment reminders drafted for you to send. When the client pays by card, the money moves through your own connected Stripe account.

Lets you leave. Full export of everything, at any time, including while you are cancelling.

What it does not do

Scheduling and booking links. Lead-capture forms. Time tracking. Client-side project management boards. Bookkeeping and tax.

Some of those are things the all-in-one platforms do well, and if they are what you need, the three-way comparison says so with the prices attached.

What is not settled

Pricing is decided internally and not published. There is no public plan page yet, and this post is not going to imply a number or a free tier in the meantime. When it is announced it will be announced.

What is settled, and will not change: North takes no cut of your money. Not a take-rate, not a platform fee, not a charge per invoice, at any volume. Stripe's processing fee is Stripe's and it goes to Stripe. You are also never charged to be told that a client accepted, signed, or paid, because being told your invoice was paid is not a premium feature.

The one thing it will not do

North drafts; you decide. Nothing reaches a client without you taking a deliberate action, and that holds even where North has already written the thing and is confident about it.

That constraint costs us a demo where the software sends a proposal by itself, which would be more impressive to watch. It is worth the trade. The relationship with your client is the entire asset in this line of work, and it is not something to hand to a piece of software with a good week behind it.

Who it is for

People who are good at the work and tired of the machinery around it. If you have ever finished a project you were proud of and then spent a Sunday evening trying to remember what you agreed to in week two, that is the problem being solved.

The honest test is not whether North is impressive. It is whether the proposal you send on Tuesday is better than the one you would have written yourself at eleven at night on Monday.