FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

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 and Fargate We also offer limited availability for flexible Reserved Instances for: RDS OpenSearch DynamoDB 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?	We are free to use for up to 30 days. 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 our savings fee will be 20%. If we do not help you save, we do not charge.
What security is in place?	You can view our permissions here.
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. Our support includes monthly meetings, AWS support, dedicated Slack, and monthly pre and post sales engineering hours with our technical teams to help our customers build more and better in the cloud.
Can I have my billing delivered via email?	Yes. Our billing is powered by Stripe. We invoice on the 10th of each month.
Do I still pay AWS?	Yes. For customers choosing to keep direct billing with AWS, you will receive your AWS monthly bill and an invoice via Stripe from North for the 20% flex savings fee. This fee is metered using live data from your actual cost savings the prior month.
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.
I see a button for Autopilot. What is that?	Autopilot is North's hassle-free, reservation-less savings solution. With Autopilot, you can effortlessly tap into our consolidated billing system, accessing group-purchased Savings Plans (SPs) and Reserved Instances (RIs) only as your workload demands each month. Our advanced AI algorithm intelligently matches your account with similar AWS customers within shared billing organizations, enhancing flexibility and maximizing purchasing power. Here's how it works: North takes full ownership and operation of SPs/RIs at the billing account level, empowering you to enjoy the benefits of 3-year commit discounts without any long-term commitments or contracts. Say goodbye to handoff periods and reservation decisions—Autopilot streamlines the entire process, ensuring you get exactly what you need, precisely when you need it.
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 AWS account in which they were reserved. However, via discount sharing, any account in a common consolidated billing group can use Savings Plans within that group. North's underlying Savings Plans live under member account "Savings Pods". During transfer, we disconnect the member account(s) "Savings Pods" to recycle them internally for our usage or share them with other clients. This unlocks fantastic flexibility for our clients, whom enjoy subscribing to Savings Plans credits versus carrying their own terms and commitment to AWS.
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]