ConcursosGov is a new product from Caixa Mágica Software. It does one thing: it turns the daily flow of Portal BASE notices into a short list your team can decide on in minutes, with the tender documents already read by AI.
Every Portuguese public tender is published. Every notice sits on Portal BASE, free to read, updated every day. Companies still lose contracts that suited them perfectly, because nobody had the time to go and look. That gap is the whole reason the product exists.
It is live now, with a 14-day trial that asks for no payment details. What follows is what it does, who it is for and what it costs.
What Portal BASE gives you, and what it does not
Portal BASE is the official publication point for Portuguese public procurement, operated by IMPIC. Every contracting authority in the country publishes there. Anyone can read it without an account, a subscription or a fee. As a piece of public infrastructure it works.
What it is not is a tool for suppliers. It publishes notices in the order they arrive, from every sector at once. A software company scrolling through a normal week sees road surfacing, school catering, medical consumables, cleaning contracts and street lighting. The two or three procurements that actually concern it sit somewhere in the middle. The portal has no opinion about which ones are yours, and no reason to have one.
That is the job ConcursosGov does. It tracks the notices published daily on Portal BASE, filters them by the CPV codes chosen by the company and assigns every procurement a score from 0 to 100. The score is based on procedure type, capability match, base value, award criteria and location. AI reads the tender documents of every procurement and extracts deadlines, criteria and requirements as structured fields.
This is worth being precise about, because the product is easy to mistake for something it is not. ConcursosGov does not submit bids. Submission happens on the electronic platforms licensed by IMPIC. We do not touch that step. It works before that, on the part where companies lose opportunities without ever knowing it.
Six things it does, and not one more
Every capability below exists because it removes a specific piece of manual work. None of them exist to fill a row in a comparison table.
The one we expect to be underrated is the decision log. Most tools in this space sell discovery, on the assumption that finding the tender is the hard part. In practice, companies that bid regularly lose more to process than to discovery: the same procurement reviewed twice, a decision nobody can reconstruct, a handover where the reasoning left with the person.
What the first session looks like
Setup is short. It is the only part that asks anything of you. Create an account and choose the CPV codes that describe what your company sells. The first filtered list appears the same day, drawn from the notices currently open on Portal BASE.
The CPV vocabulary holds more than nine thousand codes, which sounds intimidating and mostly is not. Almost every company covers its activity with a handful. A software firm usually lives in division 72, sometimes with a code or two from 48 for packaged software. It may add one from 79 if it sells consulting alongside delivery. The real work is deciding how wide to cast. A broad code brings more tenders and more noise. A narrow one brings fewer and risks missing adjacent work you could have won.
Most accounts adjust their codes in the first week. That is the intended behaviour rather than a sign of a bad start. You see what actually arrives, notice that one code brings in three procurements a day that have nothing to do with you, and drop it. Or you notice contracts being awarded under a code you had not considered, and add it. The trial runs fourteen days precisely so this tuning happens before anyone pays for anything.
After that the product runs without being asked. New notices matching your codes arrive scored. The tender documents behind them are read by AI. The list is there when someone opens it. The ordinary use of ConcursosGov is a few minutes a day rather than an afternoon a week. The shift from the second to the first is most of the value.
Who it is built for
ConcursosGov is for the companies that bid, not for the contracting authorities that publish on Portal BASE. Within that, it fits two situations particularly well. There is a third where it will not help much.
What it costs
Plans start at €49 per month, excluding VAT. They are separated by the number of CPV codes monitored at once, from 1 to 20, and the number of users, from 3 to 100. Within your codes there is no cap on the number of tenders. AI reading of the tender documents is included in every plan.
The trial runs 14 days and asks for no card. When it ends there is no automatic charge: access pauses until a plan is chosen. The CPV codes and decisions already recorded stay where they are.
Current prices are published in full on the ConcursosGov pricing page, which is less common in this market than it should be. Many platforms in the category ask you to fill in a form and wait for a call before they will tell you what they charge. If a company has to talk to us to find out the price, that is our problem and not theirs.
Why Caixa Mágica built it
We have spent twenty years building software. A fair amount of that work involved the machinery of Portuguese public administration. That experience taught us how procurement notices are written and published on Portal BASE. It is useful knowledge to have when you are designing something that reads them at scale.
But ConcursosGov sits on the other side of that table. It is built for the supplier deciding whether a contract is worth chasing. The design decisions follow from that. The score is tuned to a bidder's questions rather than a buyer's. The AI reading pulls out what a bidder needs first: deadlines, award criteria and team requirements. The decision log exists because sales teams get asked to justify what they did not pursue. The export exists because commercial meetings need a document. None of those needs belong to a contracting authority.
It is also a product rather than a project. For us that means it ships, gets used and changes based on what people actually do with it. The first version covers Portal BASE, the Portuguese national portal. It does not cover TED or other national portals. We would rather say that plainly than have someone discover it in week two and cancel.
Frequently asked questions
Seven questions come up in every conversation about the product. The answers are collected here.
What is ConcursosGov?
Is ConcursosGov an official Portal BASE service?
How does ConcursosGov use AI?
Can the AI reading get things wrong?
If Portal BASE is free, why pay for ConcursosGov?
Does ConcursosGov submit bids?
How much does ConcursosGov cost and is there a trial?
