How ConfirmOk Keeps Daily Senior Check-Ins Running Without Downtime

A majority of older adults see aging in place—or the ability to grow old in one’s same home and community—as an important goal of theirs, with 94% of surveyed seniors saying they want to age in place as of 2025, according to a 2025 U.S. News & World Report survey. As demand for aging-in-place solutions grows, ConfirmOk is scaling a system where reliability isn’t just a feature; it’s the product. The company automates daily check-in calls to seniors and vulnerable residents, ensuring that if someone doesn’t respond, local authorities can step in.

ConfirmOk uses the DigitalOcean App Platform, Managed PostgreSQL, and workers to power reliable, event-driven check-ins at scale. The fully-managed stack gives a small team the ability to stay reliable, monitor performance, and grow with minimal overhead.

Turning daily check-ins into scalable public safety infrastructure

ConfirmOk sits at the intersection of public safety and accessibility. Law enforcement agencies, nonprofits, and community organizations use its platform to run telephone reassurance wellness check programs at scale, reaching residents who may otherwise fall through the cracks. These are often seniors living independently, with adult children in different cities, distant relatives, or no immediate support network, says Leon Smith, Founder and CEO at ConfirmOk.

The product is rooted in Smith’s own caregiving experience.

“Fifteen years ago, my dad was quadriplegic, and this was something that I wish I had for him. Just checking on him, [knowing] he’s okay, without having to drive to his house,” Smith explains.

That personal need became a system serving three groups at once: individuals who want a safety net, families monitoring loved ones from a distance, and agencies running telephone reassurance wellness programs for whole communities.

“As more seniors are living alone, as more people want to age in place, many people don’t have family around. ConfirmOk fills that gap,” he says.

When high availability is critical

Reliability is non-negotiable for a system that operates daily check-ins tied to public safety. ConfirmOk initially ran on Heroku, but growing concerns around uptime and platform stability forced the team to reevaluate.

“Last year, Heroku had some pretty huge outages that impacted our uptime,” Smith says. “Since we check in on seniors daily, uptime is really important to us.”

At the same time, the team faced uncertainty following Heroku’s announcement of a transition to a sustaining engineering model. That triggered a search for alternatives, including Fly.io, Render, Railway, and Northflank. What ultimately set DigitalOcean apart wasn’t just pricing or features—it was a consistent eagerness to help.

“The biggest item was support. Because our team is relatively small, the response time and the depth of support that DigitalOcean offered when getting started was night and day with all the other players in the market,” Smith says.

That support proved decisive during migration.

“We received a lot of just one-on-one Slack time with engineers to provide technical architecture feedback. It made the migration seamless,” Smith says.

An integrated, more resilient stack on App Platform

Today, ConfirmOk runs its core infrastructure on the DigitalOcean App Platform, supported by Managed Databases and worker-based processing to handle its high-volume, event-driven workloads.

“We’re using App Platform, that’s our base product. Within App Platform, we’re using workers who make the phone calls and send out alerts,” Smith says.

The system is built on Laravel, Redis, and PostgreSQL, with queues orchestrating outbound calls and alert workflows. Managed PostgreSQL with a multi-node configuration adds resilience to the system.

“We’re also using the Postgres database service within DigitalOcean and the multi-node service. That just gives us an extra layer of availability should something happen,” Smith says.

The team also relies on built-in observability and deployment tooling to keep operations simple. App Platform deploys new code automatically from GitHub commits, while Insights surfaces real-time metrics on CPU, memory, and request volume. Alert policies notify the team when resources cross a set threshold.

“The dashboard and the insights on our platform have been really key for us. Insights gives us a really quick snapshot to see if we need to change anything or how the app is performing,” Smith explains.

For a lean engineering team, simplicity matters. They don’t have a dedicated DevOps or platform team, so opting for a provider that handles infrastructure out of the box was a must.

“Being able to provision servers, workers, and the database at a click of a button or a command and within the UI reduces that anxiety for us,” he says.

From unpredictable errors to reliable daily check-ins at scale

The move to DigitalOcean delivered immediate improvements in reliability and operational clarity. According to Smith, Heroku’s platform would generate random 400 error blips, which meant Smith’s team spent a lot of time troubleshooting. Stability is critical as the company grows, especially as ConfirmOk works with public agencies to serve aging populations.

App Platform provides the necessary high reliability, helping enable Smith’s team to spin up a new server with the push of a button, with greater operational confidence. It’s also backed by the DigitalOcean technical team, which Smith immediately noticed as an enhancement from Heroku, starting with the migration process to the current ConfirmOk production setup.

In Smith’s experience, submitting an issue on Heroku meant waiting at least a week for a response, while DigitalOcean engineers respond within 8 hours (with the Developer support tier) and have been consistently available to address questions about product features, optimizations, and potential concerns.

“Having direct access to engineers was hands down the main reason why we moved to DigitalOcean. Our platform helps police departments, sheriff’s offices, senior homes, and people living alone age in place. The infrastructure reliability and support DigitalOcean offers directly supports [our mission],” Smith says.

Building the future of AI-powered senior care

The reliability, scalability, and support from DigitalOcean allow ConfirmOk’s engineering team to focus on how they want to build out their platform and integrate AI features; the team is better able to manage infrastructure reliability or ongoing architecture configuration.

“On Heroku, the day-to-day was spent on infrastructure and architecture or thinking about ways the system can fail. Because DigitalOcean has the reliability with App Platform specifically, it has helped us with predictable deployments and made troubleshooting a lot easier,” Smith says.

ConfirmOk plans to continue scaling its core services while layering in AI capabilities that make interactions more human and responsive. The team is already thinking about how large language models could support more natural, conversational check-ins. Or exploring capabilities that capture tone and how a person is feeling during a call with family members or local agencies.

The company is currently testing DigitalOcean serverless inference, which offers Anthropic’s Claude models, to see how such voice-call capabilities could come to life and provide another dimension of senior care—all within the AI-Native Cloud.

“We’re comfortable that DigitalOcean has the servers needed [for AI features] and the LLM support. We’re going to be here on DigitalOcean for a while; it allows us to grow and scale at the click of a button,” Smith says.

Note that results in customer environments may vary depending on configuration, implementation, and usage. Results and/or savings are not guaranteed.

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