When Clint Bounds and his family began learning how to meal plan, he thought there must be an app for that. The options he found left much to be desired. “I just assumed there was an app out there that I could use for meal planning, but I couldn’t find anything that had the features I was looking for,” he recalls. Clint decided to build one himself—first for his family, and then for the tens of thousands of customers who now rely on Plan to Eat to organize meals, shop efficiently, and save time.

What started in Houston over 15 years ago, later grew into a thriving business headquartered in Loveland, Colorado. Today, Plan to Eat serves a diverse base, from busy parents to nutrition-conscious individuals, taking the headache out of the daily task many find to be challenging.

Starting Out

For years, Plan to Eat ran its infrastructure on AWS via Engine Yard. While the setup worked, it came with complexity and stress. Clint often received monthly emails that a server had failed—even with redundancy in place. “The server aspect has always been one of the more stressful parts for me personally,” he says. As a designer and coder, he wanted to focus on creating a great user experience, not managing unpredictable infrastructure.

Finding the Right Fit

When Clint began searching for a new hosting solution, he wanted something powerful (yet approachable) that offered more control than Heroku but without AWS’s complexity. Recommendations from fellow developers and online research led him to DigitalOcean.

“I’ve always kind of felt like an underdog, both as a person and as a company,” says Clint. “DigitalOcean felt kind of like the underdog, and they had the capabilities I needed. When you’re not the biggest, you have to work harder—and that’s what I was looking for.”

Through DigitalOcean’s customer service, Clint connected with Crafty Penguins, a managed hosting partner. “My initial conversation with them was amazing. I just felt like 15 years of not being able to sleep at night melt away,” he says. The migration was handled with virtually zero downtime, and the partnership allowed Clint to step away from server management entirely.

The DigitalOcean Solution

Today, Plan to Eat runs a staging and production environment with multiple app and database servers powered by DigitalOcean Droplets Droplets—intentionally “overpowered” for peak reliability and speed. “I want the product to be excellent. I don’t want it to slow down ever,” Clint explains. They also use Volumes detachable block storage for backups.

Crafty Penguins built a robust deployment process that allows quick rollbacks, while DigitalOcean provides the infrastructure backbone. In over two years on DigitalOcean, Plan to Eat has experienced no major outages—something Clint can’t say about his AWS years.

“I like that there’s not a single point of failure,” Clint says. “When huge companies on AWS have issues, our website just keeps humming along. That feels great.”

Looking Ahead

With infrastructure managed, Clint can devote energy to design, UX, and new features. Plan to Eat is embracing steady, sustainable growth while exploring responsible AI integration to make meal planning even easier. Clint envisions AI features that enhance, not replace, user control: “People still get to make choices, but they have a little more help than before.”

The company’s philosophy remains rooted in quality over speed. “We’ve always considered ourselves the turtle in the race. The goal is to make a difference in people’s lives and help people,” Clint says. With DigitalOcean powering their infrastructure, Plan to Eat is well-positioned to keep delivering on that mission—without losing sleep over servers.