Hi! I made Nomad List so maybe I can tell you more. I wrote it in plain JS with only jQuery. The backend is PHP. They communicate through simple POST requests (see the Network tab when you filter). The database is SQLite for simplicity sake.

I'd recommend building something with a language that is easy for you to learn and that gives you freedom to make it complex or not. That's PHP for me. A big reason why I say this is because you don't want to spend too much time coding while validating your website/app idea.

You can always switch language/stack later.

I decided to go framework-less, which was a great decision early on. And I still like it although once you get more traffic and features, everything inevitably turns into spaghetti and you need to stay very knowledgable about your code to keep being able to work on it. Stuff like user sign up and login I'd love to have outsourced to a framework (for example this week login broke for no reason).

Also some parts of the site run on off the shelf software. The forum runs on Discourse, the chat runs on Slack etc.

I was obsessed with which tools to use before I made Nomad List, but then when it went viral I had to work with whatever I knew and I hear that from a lot of people. You work with what you know at that time.

Good luck :)