I wouldn't say Celery's learning curve is steeper than Django's, but it definitely seems like overkill for your case. If you need to do some time-consuming action periodically (and making an HTTP request by hand each time is not an option), then you could just use cron for the start if your project is relatively simple. And if you literally need to just produce some HTML when asked for, then why are you considering using an async task processor such as Celery?