A small, quiet tool for a specific problem.

What TAXCLARA does

TAXCLARA is a year-round financial dashboard for English-speaking residents of Portugal. Today: a free tax calculator, 37 in-depth guides, and plain-English deadline alerts for IRS, IVA, Segurça Social and retenção na fonte. Coming next: read-only bank sync through regulated PSD2-certified open banking that updates your monthly tax estimate as you earn and spend - rolling out to founding members first.

TAXCLARA does not file your IRS. Only an OCC-certified contabilista can do that legally in Portugal. What we do is remove the surprise - so when a contabilista does file, you already know the number.

Who built it

TAXCLARA is built by Andrew Kovalenko, a software engineer living in Lisbon. It’s operated by CYBER MIND Unipessoal LDA, a Portuguese company registered in Lisbon. Every line of code, every email, every decision is personally made here - there is no outsourced support desk in a different time zone.

The story

I moved to Portugal from Ukraine in 2022, when the war started. When you arrive that way, you rebuild the practical side of life fast — and Portuguese tax confused me from the very beginning: a government portal entirely in Portuguese, rules that assume you already know how they work, and no clear answer to the one question that actually matters — what do I owe?

I’m a software engineer, not a tax professional. So I’d do the work, earn the money, and still have no real idea of the number until a contabilista told me months later. For something that takes a real slice of your income, that felt backwards.

So I built the thing I wanted: a way to see the number, in English, any day of the year, and trust it. First for myself — I file my own IRS every year, and TAXCLARA is what I check. Then I started writing down everything I’d learned, guide by guide, so the next person wouldn’t have to piece it together from forum threads and Google Translate.

It’s still small, and I’m building it in the open. If it saves you one of those “wait, how much do I actually owe?” evenings, it’s done its job.

Why we’re doing this

Portugal has roughly 1.5 million foreign residents and is one of the fastest-growing expat destinations in Europe. The existing options for handling Portuguese tax as an English-speaker are: a local contabilista who may or may not answer your emails, a premium service costing €500-€1,300/year, or Portal das Finanças - which is entirely in Portuguese and changes whimsically.

TAXCLARA is the gap between those: a small, focused tool that gives you visibility all year, in your language, at a price that makes sense.

How TAXCLARA makes money

Two ways, both boring on purpose. First: the year-round tax dashboard — €99/year, currently in private beta. Second: when a guide convinces you that you need professional help, we point you to a partner we’ve vetted and they pay us a referral fee — always disclosed inline, always a firm or tool we’d use ourselves, and it never changes what you pay.

What we don’t do: file tax returns. Only an OCC-certified contabilista can legally file on your behalf in Portugal, and we aren’t one — by law and by design. That’s why the calculator and all guides are free and stay free: they’re how you find out what you need, not something we sell. No ads, no selling your data, no “free trial” traps.

Human-written, double-checked

Every guide on TAXCLARA is written and verified by a human. We use AI for the editorial scaffolding — outlines, copy edits, formatting — but never for the specifics that matter: rates, rules, deadlines, eligibility, or anything you’d act on. Numbers come from Portal das Finanças, the OE 2026 text, and AT informações vinculativas.

If you spot something that looks AI-generated or factually off, email hello@taxclara.pt — we’ll fix it.

Company details

• Legal name: CYBER MIND Unipessoal LDA
• Registered in: Lisbon, Portugal
• Founder: Andrew Kovalenko
• Contact: hello@taxclara.pt