Fiscal Digital

Timeline

From ideation to a pipeline in production. Complete transparency on what was built, how it works, what it costs, and where we're headed.

Step 0: the provocation

Brazil has more than 5,500 municipalities. Each one publishes an official gazette with contracts, procurement, appointments, and spending. That is millions of pages per year — public data, accessible by law, but impossible to follow at a human scale.

In 2016, the Serenata de Amor project demonstrated that algorithms can identify anomalous patterns in public spending. In 2019, Querido Diário digitized the official gazettes of hundreds of Brazilian municipalities. Two pieces of civic infrastructure built by civil society, together making something new possible.

If every gazette is already digitized, what prevents an algorithm from reading the same clauses an auditor would read — and doing so for every city, every day?

Fiscal Digital connects these two legacies: it uses the Querido Diário archive as its source and the Serenata principle as its method. The focus is the municipality — where everyday purchases happen, where street works are contracted, where political appointments are published.

We do not investigate. We do not accuse. We identify patterns that existing legal criteria define as irregular and make the result verifiable by any citizen. The primary source — the official gazette — is always one click away.

Timeline

  1. Step 0 — Ideation

    before April 2026

    Done

    Discovery of Querido Diário → the provocation

  2. Sprint 1 — Infrastructure Base

    28 Apr 2026

    Done

    Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Bedrock. Scheduled Collector for Querido Diário. Terraform with OIDC. 99 unit tests.

  3. Sprint 2 — The First Agents

    01 May 2026

    Done

    5 specialized Fiscal Agents running in parallel: Procurement, Contracts, Suppliers, Personnel, Chief. Orchestration, caching, persistent memory. 129 tests.

  4. Sprint 3 — Automatic Publishing

    01 May 2026

    Done

    Multi-channel (Reddit + X + RSS). Brand-gate against prohibited glossary. DRY_RUN active for validation before live.

  5. Sprint 4 — E2E Production Smoke

    02 May 2026

    Done

    Full pipeline working end-to-end. 8,400+ gazettes processed. 12+ real alerts identified and verified. AI layer via Amazon Bedrock integrated.

  6. Sprint 5 — Site as Primary Channel

    02 May 2026

    Active

    Institutional site live (fiscaldigital.org). Public REST API with /alerts, /cities, /stats endpoints. RSS feed. 50 cities covered. 10 active Fiscal Agents.

  7. Sprint 6 — Architectural Hardening

    in progress

    Planned

    12-Factor App baseline. Structured logging, DynamoDB PITR, correlation IDs, IAM least-privilege. Ready for scale.

Current coverage

  • 50 active cities across 22 states (top 50 Brazil by population + state capitals)
  • Origin: Caxias do Sul, RS — municipal administration 2021–present
  • Daily pipeline: 03:00 BRT, 7 days a week
  • Next phase: gradual expansion as Querido Diário coverage grows

Costs and sustainability

Processing cost (live)

Gazettes processed
Alerts generated
Current month (MTD)
Real cumulative cost
Last pipeline run

Full cost breakdown

The cumulative cost shown above includes AWS infrastructure since January 2026 and the fiscaldigital.org domain (GoDaddy). The complete service breakdown, USD→BRL conversion via PTAX BCB, and daily variation live on the FiscalCustos agent's canonical page.

See breakdown at /transparencia/custos →

Funding model

Fiscal Digital is maintained by contributions from civil society. Every inflow and outflow is public. The code is open source under the MIT license.

Support on Catarse

Ongoing evaluations

Evaluating Brazilian LLMs (data sovereignty) and expansion to 5,000 municipalities with ISR support.