Why we're calling Portugal's bakeries

There’s a small, persistent question that follows anyone who’s spent a few weeks in Portugal: what’s a pastel de nata supposed to cost? A euro twenty? A euro fifty? More? It depends on the bakery, the city, the time of day, and whether you ask for the quente one straight from the oven. Nobody has the full picture.

So we’re building it. Politely.

The plan

We’ve got a list of around eight hundred padarias, pastelarias and cafés across mainland Portugal — sourced from public business registries, OpenStreetMap, and the occasional tip-off. For each one, an automated voice agent dials the number, introduces itself as a research bot, asks a single question — quanto custa um pastel de nata? — notes the answer, thanks the person, and ends the call. The whole thing takes about ninety seconds.

The transcript and the extracted price end up on the map you saw on the home page. Nothing else. We don’t keep the audio, we don’t ask for anything personal, and we won’t call the same place twice in any given month.

What this is

A small, fixed-scope research project, run from a single Cloudflare account by a single human. The infrastructure is mostly the Cloudflare agents SDK doing the heavy lifting — speech-to-text, conversation handling, text-to-speech — plus Telnyx for the actual phone leg, because the cloud cannot terminate a phone line on its own.

What this isn’t

It isn’t a scrape, it isn’t a marketing channel, and it isn’t a way for us to sell anything to bakeries. We do not collect emails. We do not call back to upsell. If a bakery would rather not be on the map, one note via the contact page and we remove them and add their number to a do-not-call list.

If you run a business that does need this sort of polite, structured information collection at scale, the footer has a discreet link — drop us a line.

That’s the whole pitch. The price map is the point.