Minha Receita is an open-source and open-data project that was born from a real need for transparency. Today, it is a fundamental piece of Brazil's civic infrastructure, transforming the massive and confusing Brazilian Federal Revenue files for the CNPJ (the National Registry of Legal Entities—which contains the public records of every organization in the country, such as legal names, addresses, and ownership structures) into a clean, free, and open API for any person (or machine).

How it all started

The project's story begins in 2018, when lawyer Bruno Morassutti, civic tech specialist Turicas, and I tried to obtain data from the CNPJ through the Access to Information Act (LAI). Contrary to what the law required, the data was only available behind a CAPTCHA. The Brazilian Federal Revenue denied the request, claiming that the data would require “additional processing” to be delivered.

At the time, the only alternative offered in official responses from the federal government agency was Serpro, which charged about half a million reais for this data—data that should have been open by law. This amount obviously made any journalistic work, independent research, or civic responsibility project unfeasible.

We appealed, and in one of the final administrative instances, we managed to get the Brazilian Federal Revenue to do the basics: comply with the law. But even when the Brazilian Federal Revenue started making the data available, although open, it was definitely not accessible. Downloads were extremely slow and unstable (often making actual access impossible), the data format did not follow common standards, and there were no tools to use it easily. Furthermore, the agency did not offer an API for consultation, only some massive files that required technical expertise and powerful hardware to be used.

Minha Receita was my response to this scenario. I decided to make this data—which was now open—accessible by creating a project that offered tools for downloading and processing the data, as well as a free and open API.

Impact and scale

What started as an individual project has become popular as a robust option for open company data in Brazil. Today, Minha Receita is the engine behind initiatives like BrasilAPI, which has nearly 10,000 stars on GitHub as of May 2026. Whenever someone consults a CNPJ through these aggregators, it is the Minha Receita infrastructure working behind the scenes.

The numbers (measured in May 2026) show the scale of what we built and can be tracked in real-time on the project's metrics page. All of this is maintained with a simple and inexpensive infrastructure that costs approximately R$ 130 per month—an amount that covers the domain, database, and servers. The web API processes about 150 million monthly requests (nearly 3,000 per minute) with extremely low latency: responses with P50 and P95 are around 160ms and 250ms, respectively.

All this performance is the result of an architecture designed for maximum efficiency as an API. Every technical decision—including the choice of the Go language—was made to ensure the best performance with the lowest possible operational cost. Although I am the main maintainer and responsible for the infrastructure, the project is a collective effort: throughout its history, more than 20 people have contributed directly with code (including an initiative by a community member to add support for a different database than the project's “official” one), resulting in more than 150 forks. The project's recognition is also visible in its popularity, with nearly 2,000 stars on GitHub.

This entire journey of making data accessible eventually gained recognition from society. GitHub Brazil, for example, mentioned Minha Receita as a project that simplified access to open data and celebrated aspects such as citizenship and transparency. This relevance crossed borders: the project is also mentioned by international organizations as an example of low-cost, high-scale civic infrastructure. In universities, the project has become an essential tool for research, serving as a basis for studies ranging from deep analyses of the archeologists' labour market to practical retail price research solutions.

Guardian of public memory

In addition to facilitating current access, the project has taken on the role of a historical guardian. For years, it maintained a data mirror that preserved information from periods that the federal government stopped publishing, such as the interval between October 2021 and April 2022.

Unfortunately, this sub-service had to be deactivated at the end of 2025. As I explained at the time in a discussion about the project's sustainability, “the mirror consumes almost the entire revenue of the project.” Restoring this functionality and ensuring the preservation of this historical data remains one of the major long-term goals for the public health of data in Brazil.

Support the project

Sustaining an infrastructure that serves millions of daily accesses has costs. Low, but they exist.

The project is maintained independently and survives thanks to community support through APOIA.se or Pix, using the key d6ede813-6621-4df4-9a93-8d0108fd9b6a.

If Minha Receita is useful to you or your company, consider supporting the project to keep it online and stable.