FAQs

What does North do?	North is an AWS partner and reseller that automates and manages AWS discounting as a monthly subscription service. This allows customers to experience the ease of group buying, flexible discounts with zero-touch cost optimization.
Will North pause or change anything on my VPC?	Nope! Our service simply monitors your AWS usage posture, finds savings & allocates discounts to bring your AWS spend down. We offer subscription based Savings Plans for: EC2 Lambda ECS - Fargate We also offer limited availability for flexible Reserved Instances for: RDS OpenSearch ElastiCache
What does North do that we can't do natively with AWS?	Our SW monitors your environment and takes the manual work out of managing discounting commitments to AWS. We offer customers an alternative to directly buying their Savings Plans & Reserved Instances from AWS. With North customers enjoy the benefits of a 3 year term commitments without the vendor lock in or contracts. North automates the coverage of your savings reservations to closely match your real usage patterns in your AWS stack.
What happens if I need to reduce or cancel my service subscriptions with North?	For any cancelations of service or reduction requests, we create a small handoff period where we allocate between 30 to 120 days to find a new home for your Savings Plan or Reserved Instance, based on our MSA. No hidden fees or gotchas.
What is a Flexible Savings Plan?	Flexible AWS Savings Plans are AWS Compute Savings Plans (up to 72% off on-demand) that North owns, and allows customers to access via a monthly subscription through our Savings Pods.
Do we need to install anything?	We require read-only permissions to your billing and usage data. We don't view any sensitive data. We run light, easy & secure.
What is your pricing?	Usage of the app for savings analysis and FinOps analysis is free via our startup version ($0/mo). If you choose to subscribe to our savings plans or reserved instances, we bill you for 20% of your monthly savings vs on-demand equivalent. For example, if we help you save $10,000/mo our savings fee will be 20%. If we do not help you save, we do not charge. Our advances features can be accessed via our Premier Version, which is $599/mo. More on our pricing, here.
What security is in place?	Our application takes a extremely limited read only permission to your spending data only. We cannot edit, change or pause machines, or even view network or VPC rules. More details on our secops posture can be disclosed privately.
What is your customer support model?	We pride ourselves on customer experience. Every account gets 24/7 access to their account team, including our CTO, CEO and a certified Cloud FinOps practitioner via Slack. Premier version clients get a more immersive client experience that includes dedicated reporting & monthly meetings.
Can I have my billing delivered via email?	Yes. Our billing is powered by Stripe. We invoice around the 10th of each month.
Do I still pay AWS?	Yes. You still keep your billing account direct with AWS.
What if I have current savings plans or reserved instances?	That's OK. North's service spots and models any additional savings you can achieve. If you prefer our service, you can replace aging Savings Plans and RIs with our Flex SPs and Flex RIs. Our SW will identify existing savings plans and reserved instances and only suggest additional coverage that works in conjunction with your usage.
Do you support customers with EDPs?	Yes. Customers that have direct EDPs can still enjoy the benefits of rate optimization either directly with AWS or through North. Please reach out for more information. Our EDP customers save just as much as our non-EDP customers.
Do you also support EC2 Reserved Instances?	No. We only support Compute Savings Plans for EC2. Compute Savings Plans offer as good or better hourly discounting as Reserved Instances, but provide customers with dramatically more flexibility and ease of use. You can enjoy the discounting of SPs on any AWS compute services (EC2, Lambda or ECS and Fargate) anywhere in the world, without the stress of forecasting usage by region, server generation family or server size.
I see Savings Plans can't be transferred between AWS accounts. Is this true?	Savings Plans cannot be transferred from the base AWS account in which they were reserved. North commits to the SP on your behalf, underwritting the 3 year commitment to AWS, and shares the SP to your AWS org. You can use the SP as long as you wish, when no longer needed the AWS account converts back to a base payer account, where North covers the costs or transfers it to another customer who might need more SP coverage.
Do you also help with Google Cloud or Azure?	We are working on building our platform for Google Cloud. Azure is not currently covered. Please reach out for more details.
Does North have a bug bounty program?	Yes, email [e-mail]