You said app, which means you'll likely need some sort of backend. Express is pretty simple to get started with. These examples work out of the box and give you

You said app, which means you'll likely need some sort of backend. Express is pretty simple to get started with. These examples work out of the box and give you a simple starting point: https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html Then you can layer on HTML, frontend JS, and CSS. With modern typescript you can definitely write pure JS and be "fine". That said, after a while once you grok how it all works, I would try React. > Do I really need Node? As an alternative, you could look at using a vercel template with some sort of out-of-the-box cloud database. These are super simple to get started, although they go against your goal of not using frameworks for the most part. https://vercel.com/templates https://vercel.com/templates