About the Brazil Manual
Practical answers about Brazil, written by someone who lives here and has to get the same things right every week.
The Brazil Manual publishes free guides about how things actually work in Brazil — paying for something, getting a phone number, driving on a foreign license, filling the customs form, knowing which document unlocks which counter.
It is not a travel blog. There are no itineraries, no rankings and no "top ten" lists. The question behind every guide is narrower and more useful: what does someone arriving from outside need to know so that this does not go wrong?
Why it exists
Almost everything written in English about daily life in Brazil is written by people passing through, and it repeats itself because it is copied from itself. It describes the friction — the queue, the refusal, the surprise — without explaining the layer underneath, which is where the answer lives.
Meanwhile the things that trip people up are specific and checkable. PIX runs on a tax ID. Your license is valid for a defined period. The voltage in the wall changes between cities. None of that is mysterious; it is just badly explained in English.
Who writes it
The site is written by Jeff Bruno, in Curitiba. He manages e-commerce for a large retail operation, builds and runs his own software, and operates a registered company — which means invoices, tax obligations and import rules are paperwork he has to get right, not theory he read about.
Living here decides which questions get asked. It does not decide what counts as proof. Every guide on this site is documentary research: the institution that publishes the rule, the date we read it, and a short list of what we could not confirm. No guide claims we tried something ourselves, because we do not — the method page says why.
How it is paid for
The guides are free and the site carries advertising. That is the whole business model, and it has consequences we take seriously:
- No company has ever paid to appear in a guide, and none ever will. Operators, banks and apps are named when naming them is the only way to be useful — a guide about SIM cards that will not say which operators exist is worthless — but never in exchange for anything.
- We do not rank or recommend. Where guides compare, they compare published facts, with the criteria written on the page.
- There are no affiliate links on this site today. The advertising is served by ad networks, which have no say in what gets written. If that ever changes, any affiliate link will be disclosed at the top of the guide that contains it — not in small print at the bottom — and the test will be whether the guide would have been written anyway. If not, it does not get written.
What this site does not do
It does not sell anything, does not offer a service, and does not process applications, bookings or documents for anyone. It does not give legal, tax, immigration or medical advice: it explains what a published rule says and where to read it, and what to do in a specific case is between you and a professional.
It also does not stay right forever. Rules change, and each guide shows when it was published and when it was last revised. Those are two different dates on purpose — revising a guide never changes the day it first went up.
The company behind it
The site is a project of Codex Shop, CNPJ 64.855.914/0001-17, in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. Codex is the same house that operates the author's other software products; it is the legal entity responsible for this site and the data controller named in the privacy policy.
Found something wrong? Write to us. Corrections that arrive with a source go up the same week, and the guide's revision date changes to say so.