What is easiest back end to learn and scale cheaply for apps?

I'm probably going to get some hate for this, but the LAMP stack.

- Can all be run off one big server

- No licenses or costs

- Super stable and battle proven

- Deployment, development, and debugging is stupidly simple

- If you don't want to do your own server admin there are millions of hosts

- Everything can be solved by Googling and copying and pasting

- Developers are easy to come by

- Frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony exist (not that you have to use one)

Remember, you said easiest... not best. :)

* Although "best" is subjective!!!

Why care about scaling cheaply before you have success. But my advice would be a lambdalith. Get Django, dotnetcore minimal api, fastapi, node.js or laravel, deploy it on lambda with a wrapper for free and if you scale up to the point lambda is too expensive, docker it into a vps.

https://mangum.io/ Or https://codewithmukesh.com/blog/hosting-aspnet-core-web-api-... for examples.

When it comes to mobile apps firebase is king it seems.

Check this:

- https://free-for.dev/#/

C# with ASP.Net Core is amazing.

The C programming language

Serverless event-driven architectures are great.