NomadPacket: Your D8 Visa Documents, Done Right

Last year, nearly 10,000 people applied for Portugal’s D8 visa. About 82% of them got approved. The other 18% didn’t fail because they weren’t qualified — most of them failed because of paperwork. A motivation letter that didn’t quite match the income summary. An employer confirmation letter with the wrong wording. A visa form field left blank because nobody explained it needed to be filled in. Small, avoidable, expensive mistakes. I kept seeing the same pattern in nomad forums and Reddit threads: someone asking “has anyone seen a sample motivation letter?” followed by three replies linking to three different blog posts, none of which quite matched their situation. Or someone admitting they paid an immigration lawyer $1,200 to write four pages of fairly formulaic text — because the alternative felt too risky to attempt alone. That gap is what NomadPacket is built for. The problem nobody talks about until they’re in it If you’re applying for Portugal’s D8 visa from the US, UK, or Canada, you need four documents, and they all have to agree with each other: A motivation letter explaining why you’re moving and confirming your income is location-independent An employer confirmation letter (or, if you’re self-employed, a freelancer/business income narrative) backing up your income claim An income summary sheet proving your average monthly income clears the current threshold — €3,680 as of 2026, recalculated every year against Portugal’s minimum wage A pre-filled national visa application form, the actual official Portuguese government paperwork Here’s the part that trips people up: these documents aren’t independent. If your motivation letter says you’ve lived in Boston for three years and your visa form lists a different address, that’s exactly the kind of small inconsistency that gets you a follow-up request from the consulate — or worse, a quiet rejection with no explanation. Nobody warns you about this until it’s already happened to them. So people do one of two things. They spend a weekend reading seven different blog posts and PDFs, patch together their own documents, and hope they got the format right. Or they pay a lawyer four figures to do something that, structurally, isn’t actually that complicated — it just has to be consistent, complete, and correctly formatted. I didn’t think there should be a third option that costs nothing and a fourth option that costs a month’s rent. There should be something in between. What I built instead NomadPacket is a questionnaire. You answer it once — your nationality, your income, your employment type, when you’re planning to move — and it generates all four documents from that single set of answers. Not four separate forms where you re-enter your name four times and hope you typed your income the same way twice. One source of truth, four consistent documents. Become a Medium member If you’re employed, it drafts your employer confirmation letter (which you’d still send to your HR team to sign — I’m not going to pretend an AI can forge your employer’s signature, nor would I want it to). If you’re a freelancer or business owner, it writes a different letter entirely, one that explains client relationships and variable income the way a consulate actually expects to see it, rather than forcing your situation into a template built for salaried employees. It costs $59. You can preview everything before you pay a cent. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. I’m not trying to replace an immigration lawyer for people with complicated cases — prior visa refusals, criminal record complications, unusual income structures. Those situations genuinely need a human who can think through edge cases. But for the large majority of applicants whose situation is actually straightforward — stable remote income, clean record, no prior refusals — paying $1,000+ to have someone else type up four documents from a template felt like a waste of money I didn’t think should exist anymore. Why I think this matters beyond just saving people money The frustrating thing about immigration paperwork is that it’s designed to test whether you can follow a bureaucratic process correctly, not whether you’re actually qualified to move somewhere. Plenty of people who’d make great additions to a new country get tripped up by a form field they didn’t know existed, or a letter that didn’t use quite the right phrasing — while people with money to spare just pay someone else to handle the bureaucracy and never think about it again. I don’t think the solution to bureaucracy should only be “hire someone richer-feeling to translate it for you.” It should be possible to just… understand it. Clearly. Once. Without needing a law degree or a four-figure invoice. That’s the bet I’m making with NomadPacket: that most of what people are actually paying lawyers for, in the D8 visa context specifically, is clarity and consistency — not judgment calls that require a license to make. If you’re applying for a D8 visa (or know someone who is) NomadPacket currently supports applicants coming from the US, UK, or Canada. You can see exactly what you’d get — for free — before deciding whether it’s worth $59 to you. If you’ve already gone through this process and have horror stories, or things I got wrong, I genuinely want to hear them. This is early, and the whole point is to get it right for the people actually living through it, not to guess from the outside what they need. 👉 nomadpacket.app