Vitória, Espírito Santo. Five thirty in the morning. I would get up, grab the car and drive down to the bakery, in Bairro Universitário.
I was there. Not as the owner — my partners were the owners. But following the choreography of problems a small business faces between the first coffee and lunchtime. And it is exactly from there, from that bakery, that the project we publish today was born.
The morning choreography
The first batch came out with a few extra bubbles — let it go, we'll set that bread aside for internal use only. The old mixer still ran by divine grace, with that characteristic creaking, and needed yet another emergency repair — call the mechanic, see if he can come today. Today is CERTUB day. When that client held training sessions, the bakery supplied the coffee break — and the coffee break had to be flawless.
And while the morning kept going over there, nine thousand kilometres and four time zones away, Otoni fought the other battle: Brazilian accounting. That thousand-headed monster that devours small business owners at breakfast. It took us months to organise everything properly. Hard work. But even after everything was in order, there was always — always — one thing that kept coming back. Every single day.
Someone needed a receipt.
"Can you make me a quick receipt?"
The employee asking for a salary advance. The Ceasa supplier who delivered fruit, vegetables and fresh eggs at dawn and wanted proof in hand before climbing back into the truck. The electrician Luciano who yesterday fixed the counter outlet. The mixer technician, of course.
And there the small torture began.
You'd stop what you were doing. Go down to the office. Open the computer. Look for that receipt template in Word — always in a different place, always misconfigured. The fields came out crooked. The printer spat out a sheet that looked typewritten in the nineties. Stamp it, sign it, run back up. The supplier waited leaning against the truck.
And every day the same thought:
How is it possible that there still isn't a simple, free, beautiful website where any Brazilian can generate a receipt in thirty seconds?
We searched. Several times. What you found online was a digital graveyard: sites stuffed with blinking ads, generators that required CPF (the Brazilian tax ID, used for everything) and phone number to deliver a five-line PDF, layouts from the 2000s you'd be embarrassed to send to a client. Apps loaded with banners. And, worse still, the "free generators" that were just a gateway to paid systems at R$ 149, R$ 199, R$ 449 per year — because after two receipts the page pushed you: "now subscribe to really get organised".
All ugly. All slow. All disrespectful to anyone who just wanted to prove a payment and get on with life.
An orphan problem
The receipt is part of the real economy of Brazil. Micro-entrepreneurs, self-employed, freelancers, service providers, landlords, private tutors, nail technicians, builders, lawyers, photographers, neighbourhood bakeries like that one. Millions of people need, every day, a decent piece of paper that says: received, it's paid, it's documented.
Not a tax invoice. Not an ERP. Not a SaaS at a hundred and fifty reais per year. Just a clean document, with a name, amount, date, description. Nice enough to send via WhatsApp without apologising.
It was exactly the kind of problem that kept gnawing at the brain: so basic, so universal, that precisely because of this nobody had taken it seriously as a public service. Everyone built their own crappy generator, stuck three AdSense banners on top, or turned it into bait for a paid SaaS — and moved on. Brazilians kept getting by, between a batch and an advance.
The bakery season ended. Years passed. I founded Arkad Consulting in Nice. And that project, annoyingly simple, stayed in the drawer.
One day we'll do it.
One day we'll have time.
One day we'll find a dev, a designer, a budget.
And that day never came — because in the life of a consulting agency there's always a client who pays now and an internal project that can wait. Always.
What changed in 2026
This project, which seemed too big for the drawer to open, was built in very few days.
Not because Arkad Consulting has more people now. Not because we found an investor. Not because the day gained more hours.
Because AI changed in a brutal way — brutal is the right word — the speed at which an idea becomes an online product. Specification, architecture, code, design, SEO, copy, deploy. Everything that used to take months for four people is now a conversation between us and our agents. The drawer opened by itself.
And when it opened, the old project from the Vitória bakery was there, intact, waiting.
Meet Recibo Gratuito
One website. Thirty seconds. PDF ready.
No mandatory sign-up. No blinking ads. No app download. No hidden monthly subscription. No fine print. No "try free for 7 days and then we charge you R$ 149".
You open the site, fill in the fields — payer, payee, amount, description — and download a clean, professional PDF you're not embarrassed to send to the client.
It works for the Ceasa supplier, for the employee asking for an advance, for the mixer technician, for the nail tech, for the micro-entrepreneur, for the landlord, for the freelancer, for anyone who has ever heard "can you make me a quick receipt?" and lost five minutes of their life solving something that should take thirty seconds.
Wait. All of this for free? What's the catch?
None. Seriously. Let me explain.
Arkad Consulting is an AI and automation consultancy. What we sell to companies is simple to describe and hard to do: we reorganise messy processes, automate tasks that drain hours every day, and build bespoke systems that let the client's business breathe again. That's it. That's our work. That's our payment.
Recibo Gratuito is not a product that needs to sustain us — it's a living demo of what we do. Built in a few days with our own AI agents, precisely to show something that still seems abstract to many business owners: with AI applied well, today you no longer have to choose between doing it fast and doing it well. You can do both, in a fraction of the time and budget you used to imagine.
So it will stay free. Forever. No catch, no upsell, no trial that turns into automatic billing, no Pro version hidden in a corner. If one day we add more advanced features — login, automatic email sending, integrations — the goal is for them to stay free too. The generator, the history, saved clients, the logo, the PDF, the sending — everything stays free as long as Arkad Consulting exists.
Because our business is something else. And because we believe that some things, in Brazil, simply shouldn't cost money.
The gift
Brazil — this is our gift to you.
Use it freely. Share it with whoever needs it. Send it to the family group, the freelancer friends group, the neighbourhood group, the bakery owners group. If it's useful to a single person who loses five minutes every week over a receipt, every line of code was worth it.
And if you read this and think "I have a similar project in my company, something sitting in a drawer for years that maybe today AI could solve in a few weeks instead of a few years" — talk to us. That's exactly what we do. This website is the proof.
Your company's drawer can open too.