Announcing the Next North

Today we’re excited to release the next version of North, which includes several major new features and a redesigned UI. These changes are a major step forward in how Cloud & infrastructure teams manage cloud costs at scale.

Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with some of the most advanced teams in the world—people deep in AWS and GCP bills, juggling commitments, usage spikes, and spreadsheets—and we kept hearing the same thing: cloud cost tools still require too much manual work. 

North 2.0 is our answer to that.

This release brings our biggest set of improvements to date across commitment automation, cloud health visibility, cost allocation & FinOps project management. 

Here’s what’s new, and what’s next.

Ready to try it? Book a demo or create a free account to get building.

Introducing Arctic: Commitment management that adapts in real time 

When it comes to managing cloud spend, long-term commitments have always been the best way to save. But they come with a catch: you’re forced to predict the future. That means how much compute you’ll need, where it’ll run, and whether your architecture will even look the same in six months.

Most tools still ask you to make that call up front. But we think there’s a better way.

We built Arctic, to make cloud commitments smarter, more flexible, and actually responsive to real-world usage. Arctic is a commitment automation engine that continuously reallocates your AWS and GCP reservations based on what’s really happening in your environment and not what you guessed last quarter.

With Arctic, you can:

• Avoid overcommitment and under-coverage automatically
• Reuse idle commitments across regions and accounts
• Scale your commitment footprint up or down in real time

It runs quietly in the background, automatically adjusting your commitments to fit actual usage, without manual tweaks, spreadsheets, and guesswork.

Customers are already reporting up to 55% in compute savings just by letting Arctic do its thing.

It’s one of the most powerful cost unlocks we’ve ever built.

Read the full breakdown on Arctic here.

Making FinOps collaboration simpler, without relying on tags

Cloud cost allocation is only as good as the metadata it depends on, and tags have always been a weak link. They’re inconsistent across teams, hard to enforce, and nearly impossible to trust at scale.

That’s why we’ve continued to invest in visibility that works without them.

With Coststreams, North.Cloud now provides a more detailed, queryable view of your cloud spend, with no tagging required. Backed by an ML engine that learns your business as you go. 

You can:

• View live spend by team, service, environment, or account
• Filter resources based on provisioned state or tagging completeness
• Generate clean allocation exports for finance or reporting workflows
• Tie costs back to business units, enabling smarter budgeting, showback & chargeback

This update helps engineering and finance teams work from the same source of truth, without adding operational overhead.

Built-in budgets for every stream 

Cloud budgets often live in spreadsheets, disconnected from what’s actually happening in your infrastructure. That’s why we built budgets directly into Coststreams, so teams can set thresholds, track spend in real time, and stay ahead of overages without the back-and-forth.

You can:

• Create budgets by account, team, or environment
• Get notified in Slack when you're approaching limits
• Drill into cost spikes to see what’s driving them
• Assign budget owners to improve accountability

Agent North

Most teams don’t need more dashboards, they need faster answers. That’s why we developed Agent North, your personal AI assistant available in both our app and Slack.

You can:

• Ask questions like “What did we spend on GKE last week?” or “Why did EC2 costs spike yesterday?”
• Generate reports, surface anomalies, and summarize savings potential instantly
• Share answers to Slack or email, with full context and links to act

Agent North brings a new layer of speed and autonomy to FinOps. It helps engineering and finance teams get what they need, without waiting on an analyst or digging through tooling. Just ask, and go.

Bringing real FinOps automation to GCP

When we first launched North.Cloud, we focused on solving one very specific problem: how to make AWS cloud cost management automatic, flexible, and engineering-friendly.

For teams running on GCP, the same problems existed. Commitments were rigid. Tools were fragmented. And getting meaningful savings meant navigating a maze of dashboards, spreadsheets, and manual effort.

That’s why we’ve expanded support across GCP. Now, users on GCP can access the same level of automation, intelligence, and visibility that North delivers for AWS.

With GCP support, you can now:

• Automate savings across Compute Engine and Cloud SQL without tagging or contract lock-in
• Monitor anomalies, track reshaping opportunities, and take action in real time
  Unlock average effective savings of 47 percent on Compute Engine and 28 percent on Cloud SQL
• Manage both AWS and GCP spend in a single, unified workflow

North.Cloud now works natively for GCP users, with the same focus on simplicity, speed, and savings. 

We’re excited to bring this to every team building on GCP. And this is just the beginning.

Every core feature, upgraded

Reshaping, now with better visibility and smarter recommendations

Rightsizing isn’t hard because the data’s missing. It’s hard because the signals are noisy, the tags are messy, and the context is buried.

Reshaping was built to change that. And with this release, it’s a lot more powerful.

We’ve redesigned the experience to give you visibility into everything that actually matters:

• Idle resources (running but unused)
• Over-provisioned instances by memory and CPU
• Tagged and untagged environments
• Monthly savings potential
• And a breakdown of current vs. recommended state

You can now filter across prod, dev, staging, and more, and see recommendations tailored to actual usage patterns, traffic spikes, and your defined headroom thresholds.

When you’re ready to take action, you can push directly to Jira or Slack, assign it to a teammate, and keep track of resolution.

Anomaly Detection, rebuilt to be faster, clearer, and more actionable

Anomaly detection shouldn’t feel like guesswork. But too often, it does, because alerts show up late, lack context, or force engineers to dig through layers of usage data just to figure out what happened.

That’s why we overhauled the experience.

With this update, we moved from broad cost-level alerts to granular, resource-level insights. Now you can:

• Pinpoint the exact service, resource, and linked account behind a spike or drop
• See critical vs. low-impact anomalies in one view
• Understand the pattern (or lack of one) based on historical usage
• Get real dollar estimates on the impact

We also added filters by service, account, and severity, plus a clear way to track resolved or ignored anomalies. That means no more digging through spreadsheets or alerts with no clear next step.

These changes remove four to five steps of manual investigation and make it easy for engineers to understand what changed, why it matters, and what to do about it.

Work smarter with interface upgrades built for speed

We’ve made a number of quality-of-life improvements across the North.Cloud platform, all focused on helping you move faster, stay focused, and take action with less effort.

Here’s what’s new:

• A streamlined homepage that surfaces KPIs, tools, and usage data at a glance for faster decision-making
• Smarter anomaly and reshaping views with improved filtering, severity levels, and resource-level drill-downs
• A refreshed health dashboard with clearer visibility into reservation coverage, service-level scores, and historical trends
• More ways to take action across the platform, including direct carbon credit purchases and easier sharing to Slack, Jira, and email

These updates are live now and ready to support faster, simpler FinOps across your team.

What’s next

We’re already working on even more control over Arctic, including per-team optimization strategies, deeper Reshaping logic for AI-heavy workloads, and faster reporting APIs across FinOps and GreenOps.

There are also bigger things coming—features that we believe will fundamentally change how teams approach FinOps. If you care about speed, clarity, and team-wide visibility, what’s ahead will raise the bar for what cloud cost management can look like.

If you’re a North.Cloud customer, we’d love your feedback as we roll these out.

And if you’re just getting started, now’s a great time to dive in. You can book a demo to see savings in action, or get started yourself in under five minutes.