What’s New on Daycare Finder: August 2026 Updates
Published August 19, 2026
August has been a busy month under the hood at Daycare Finder. We shipped a number of infrastructure and reliability improvements that make the site faster to deploy, cheaper to run, and more dependable for Massachusetts families and providers.
One-command Fly.io deploys with automatic backups. Deploying to production is now a single step. Running ./scripts/deploy-fly.sh reads the environment, backs up the production SQLite database with a timestamp, runs fly deploy with build secrets, and then performs a smoke test against the live site. If something goes wrong, the database backup is ready to restore. This makes releases safer and less error-prone.
Leaner Docker builds. We trimmed the Docker build context from hundreds of megabytes down to a few kilobytes by excluding the EEC data directory, local backups, and TypeScript build info from the image. Faster builds mean faster deploys and less time waiting.
Simplified architecture. We removed the unused AWS Amplify Gen 2 stack and its deployment scripts. Daycare Finder now focuses on two clear paths: the low-budget Docker + SQLite path that we run on Fly.io, and a generic AWS managed path using DynamoDB and S3 with your own container. The documentation in DEPLOYMENT_GUIDE.md and README has been updated to match.
Faster database queries. We finished the repository dispatcher refactor and added DynamoDB Global Secondary Indexes for city and top-rated lookups. What that means in practice: city pages like Boston and the top-rated section on the homepage load faster and put less load on the database. The same code still works with SQLite locally, so development stays simple.
More reliable provider hours and holiday closures. The enrichment pipeline now pulls holiday closure information from Google Places and backfills operating hours in larger chunks with retries. The result is more complete hours and holiday data on provider profiles, which helps families plan around closures.
Feature flags for maps and places. We added environment toggles for Google Maps and Google Places so individual features can be turned on or off without a code change. This makes it easier to keep the site stable if a third-party service has an outage or needs to be disabled.
Security housekeeping. We removed a tracked .env.local file and large historical EEC CSVs from Git history, and we added /backups/ and .omc/ to .gitignore. These changes reduce the chance of accidental secret or large-file commits in the future.
What this means for you. If you are a parent, you should see faster city pages, more accurate hours, and the same simple name search. If you are a provider, your dashboard and listings remain unchanged, but the site is now on a more reliable deployment pipeline. And if you are following the project as open source, the deployment instructions are now clearer and the codebase is smaller.
We will keep iterating on search, provider tools, and data quality through the fall. If you have feedback, use the newsletter signup on the homepage or reach out through the provider dashboard.