Camperoni is an online platform that helps parents discover camps, after-school activities, and classes for their kids, all in one place. The idea was born during a moment of shared frustration when two of the founders, both mothers, realized that managing activities separately was a pain point.

“There are three founders. I’m the only one who’s not a parent,” says Tzikis, CTO and co-founder of Camperoni. “The other two founders are moms. They basically had the same idea in the same week—camp registration week.”

The two founders met for lunch to pitch their ideas to one another, only to realize they were identical. Recognizing the opportunity, they decided to build the platform together and brought Tzikis on board to lead the technical side of the business.

“They came to me for guidance on how we should build this,” he explains. “At the end of the day, I ended up joining as a co-founder to lead the technical team.”

After validating demand with a short-lived no-code MVP, the team committed to building a scalable, production-ready platform.

“Once we realized there was actually something there, and people were interested, we started to build it from the get-go,” says Tzikis.

Choosing DigitalOcean from day one

When it came time to choose infrastructure, Tzikis drew on years of experience working with different cloud providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure. For an early-stage startup with a small team, he knew that complexity and additional overhead wouldn’t work.

“When you want to move really fast, the extra overhead of permissioning everything and using 15 different services that are weirdly named is just a little bit pointless,” he says. Without a dedicated SRE or DevOps team, Camperoni needed infrastructure that was powerful yet simple, predictable, and easy to operate.

“I’ve learned to build stuff with very limited resources,” Tzikis explains. “If you don’t have someone doing policy management and authentication all day, it’s way too much overhead and complexity.”

Having previously used DigitalOcean for personal projects, the choice was clear.

“I could see that we would be better suited with DigitalOcean than something more complex,” he says. “So we just went with it—and I’m really happy with that choice.”

Powering Camperoni’s platform on DigitalOcean

As Camperoni evolved from MVP to production platform, the team built its backend entirely on DigitalOcean’s managed services.

“We’re basically scraping every information on camps in an area and putting them online on the platform,” says Tzikis. “That started as a small Python script running on a Droplet.”

As the product matured, Camperoni transitioned to a Django-based backend and leaned into DigitalOcean’s managed offerings to reduce operational burden.

Today, Camperoni runs on:

• DigitalOcean App Platform,, which is hosting its Django backend
• Managed PostgreSQL, which serves as the primary database
• Droplets powering Python-based scraping workloads
• Spaces object storage for images and static assets, delivered via CDN
• Marketplace integrations, including Datadog for logging, monitoring, and database tools

Managed databases, in particular, have been a major time saver.

“There’s no point in me managing any of that,” says Tzikis. “As far as the cloud-hosted stuff goes, it’s been smooth sailing. Auto-updating minor versions is obviously a great thing for us.”

Saving time, staying lean, and moving faster

For Camperoni, the biggest benefit of DigitalOcean isn’t tied to a single performance metric, but time saved is one of the most valuable gains.

“I’m the bottleneck,” Tzikis explains. “We couldn’t really have a team of six developers and me managing them without an SRE if it hadn’t been for this hands-off experience.”

By eliminating infrastructure overhead, Camperoni can operate with a small, focused engineering team while continuing to grow. While Camperoni rarely needs support, Tzikis values knowing help is available when it matters.

Even when the team encountered an intermittent container networking issue, DigitalOcean’s support team worked through the problem until it was resolved.

“That’s the kind of human-to-human interaction you want from companies,” Tzikis explains. “You don’t have to jump through hoops to work with the system.”

Looking ahead: growing quietly, scaling confidently

As Camperoni continues to grow, the team keeps a close eye on new DigitalOcean features and improvements, adopting them when they add clear value.

“There’s always once a month or every few months some kind of nugget I can use,” says Tzikis, pointing to recent improvements in managed database alerts.

While Camperoni isn’t actively building AI-driven features today, the team remains open to future experimentation.

“If we ever go down the route of running our own internal LLM, it’s always in the back of my mind that we’d try it with these solutions first,” he says. “We’re heavily invested in the DigitalOcean ecosystem.”

For now, Camperoni’s vision is simple: keep infrastructure invisible and focus entirely on building a great experience for parents.

“I want DigitalOcean to be the invisible shadow behind everything we do,” Tzikis says. “The less I think about my hosting provider, the better job they’re doing.”

With DigitalOcean as its infrastructure partner, Camperoni can continue to scale confidently, without distractions.