These are not aspirations and they are not settings. Each one is a constraint the product is built around, and where there is a mechanism behind it, the mechanism is named. If one of them ever turns out to be false, the address at the bottom of this page goes to the person who has to answer for it.
It will not speak to your client
Every proposal, contract, invoice and reminder that reaches a client goes through a screen you read and a button you press. There is no auto-send, no "trusted client" mode, no follow-up sequence running in the background, and no tool inside the assistant that can email anyone. That last part is enforced in the code itself: the parts of North that draft things are forbidden by a build rule from importing the parts that send, so the constraint cannot be quietly relaxed by somebody in a hurry.
The reason is not caution. Your voice with your client is the entire asset in this line of work, and a piece of software with a good week behind it should not be allowed to spend it.
It will not set your price
North recommends a price and shows the arithmetic underneath it. You approve it, change it, or throw it out. If a client pushes back at midnight, North does not negotiate on your behalf while you sleep. It waits.
It also does not compare your number to anyone else's. It has no data on what other freelancers charge, and it will not pretend to. The price it proposes is derived from the scope in front of it and what the client told you the work is worth.
It will not grade your client
No scores, no tiers, no red and amber dots next to names, no "reliability" flags. If a client paid the last invoice thirty-eight days after it was due, that is a fact, and North will show you facts. It will not turn them into a letter grade, because the test for anything on your screen is whether you could accidentally share it on a call without harm, and a grade fails that test the moment it exists.
It will also never tell you to fire a client. It can show you what is happening. The decision is yours, because it does not know your rent, your relationship with that person, or what loyalty means to you.
It will not sell, share, or train on your work
Your client list, your rates, your notes and your proposals are stored so North can help you with them and for no other purpose. They are not sold, not shared with anyone for marketing, and not used to train anyone's models. When North drafts something, the relevant notes go to Anthropic's API, whose terms say API content is not used for training. Nothing about your pricing is ever used to suggest a price to another freelancer, even anonymised. If North ever wants pricing intelligence, it will ask, and the answer will be opt-in.
The provider-by-provider version is on the data page.
It will not rank you for clients to shop
There is no marketplace inside North and there will not be one. No reviews of freelancers, no "verified" badges, no page where a company compares you with three other people and picks the cheapest. The moment freelancers become inventory, the tool has switched sides.
It will not take a cut
When a client pays you by card, the money runs through your own Stripe account and lands with you. North's share is zero: no take-rate, no platform fee, no per-invoice charge, at any volume, on any plan. Stripe's own processing fee is Stripe's and is charged to you directly, the way it would be if you used Stripe on your own.
It will not make leaving hard
Everything you have made in North can be exported at any time, on any plan, including while you are cancelling: every client, project, proposal, contract and invoice, as a data file and as a readable document. There is no plan check on that door, and the code carries a comment forbidding anyone from adding one.
It will not move what you rely on behind a paywall
Everything listed under Free on the pricing page stays under Free. Prices only ever change for people who have not signed up yet; the price you join at is the price you keep. One honest complication, because it is coming: everything is free during the beta, including the things that will be part of Pro at launch, such as card payment and delivery stages. If you use those now, you will hear about the change by email fourteen days before it happens, anything you have already made keeps working, and accounts that exist before launch keep the founding price.
It will not make freelancing feel scarier
No "47 designers near you got more work this month." No countdown clocks, no scarcity, no notifications engineered to get you back into the app. The whole point of the thing is to lower the ambient anxiety of running your own business, and a product that manufactured more of it to keep you opening it would be lying about what it is for.
It is not a lawyer
North drafts contracts and explains what clauses do in plain language. It is not legal counsel, it can be wrong, and the contract it drafts is yours the moment you send it. Where a clause is going to carry real weight, where a client's own paperwork is involved, or where the law of your particular place matters, the right move is a short conversation with someone qualified before you sign. North will say so at those moments rather than hedging everything else it just told you.
If any line on this page stops being true, write to hello@asknorth.com. One person reads it.