AI Just Made Finding Summer Camp Way Less Painful

Summer’s almost here, and if you’re a parent, you know what that means: the great camp hunt. And honestly, it’s exhausting.

You know the drill. You fire up Google, type“soccer camps near me,”and suddenly you’re drowning in 40-plus results. Some are in the wrong town. Some don’t fit your budget. Some run on dates that conflict with your kid’s other activities. If you’ve got multiple kids at different ages—good luck sorting through that chaos manually.

Enter Simple Summers, a Sacramento-based website that DJ Waldo and his neighbor-turned-business-partner Megan Phillips launched about eight years ago for exactly this reason. They were both parents frustrated by the hunt-and-peck nightmare of finding camps that actually matched their families’needs. Their solution? An AI-powered search tool that works more like a smart filter than a search engine. Set up a profile for each kid, plug in your preferences—activity type, dates, budget, age—and the site narrows those 40 options down to the two or three that actually fit. Need camps that work for four kids at different ages simultaneously? You can set up four profiles and search all of them at once to see what overlaps. The AI figures out the scheduling puzzle for you.

The site now hosts over 3,350 camps and keeps adding new ones daily, spanning everything from STEM to sports to horseback riding. Speaking of horseback riding: Waldo notes it’s consistently the most-searched camp type on the platform, and for good reason. Those camps fill up fast and tend to be pricier, but apparently, there’s no shortage of kids (and parents) who dream of saddle time.

Here’s the business model: Simple Summers is free for parents to use. Camps can pay for premium listings, but even those who don’t get listed anyway—because the real product here is serving families, not extracting fees from them.

With summer just weeks away, this kind of tool cuts through one of parenting’s most tedious annual rituals. No more endless scrolling. No more spreadsheet hell. Just cleaner, faster matching. Sacramento families, consider your summer planning problem downgraded from“nightmare”to“manageable.”