Why we're building Canopy

Picture this: it's January. You're sorting through camps for three kids, and every camp has its own forms, its own deadlines, and its own way to pay. By February, you've started a spreadsheet to keep it all straight. By March, the spreadsheet has its own spreadsheet. You want to cry a little.

That was us. So instead of going through it again, we started building Canopy. The directory is step one, and Louisville's is live today, with every camp searchable by week, age, and neighborhood and a planner that lays the whole summer out kid by kid. Next come verified listings and an enrollment platform camps can afford, shaped in the open with the families and camps using it.

Canopy is independent, with no outside investors, no ad networks, and no data brokers. It's funded by us, two parents who saw a gap: incredible local camps and the families who love them deserved better tools, and nobody had built them, so we are. That means every product decision gets made for the people actually using it, not for a board, a quarterly target, or an exit. Slow, sustainable growth is fine; selling your attention isn't.

Long-term, Canopy pays for itself through optional, paid features for camps that want them: better tools, deeper analytics, integrations they'd otherwise have to build in-house. It's always opt-in, and it's never the cost of being listed. We're betting that if the software is good enough, camps will choose to pay for it on their own. And parents shouldn't have to subsidize either side.