I don't have any experience in Rails, but similar experience with Django. I am running several apps on my own, while still working elsewhere full-time.
The largest one has around 250 views, of maybe 80 are just basic admin views. It is basically comparable to an ERP of a medium-side company with various levels of permissions etc. I was able to get most of the functionality into production in just one month -- I was not working full-time at that time. I have estimated it with some friends, and such an ERP in the corporate world would normally take a team two years to do -- one to spec and another to implement.
It has 1-2M monthly page views depending on the season, and the highest hitting pages are read-only and heavily cached, so the server load is minimal. I am further increasing the performance by making those pages static HTML using django-distill and using Cloudflare to cache/serve them.
The key thing is to keep things as simple as possible. I avoid REST/heavy frontend frameworks whenever possible. For most views for most apps, normal HTML form request-response user interface based on Bootstrap is perfectly fine.
I started by sprinkling Javascript when it was really needed, for example client side sorting so I can avoid server load. Now I use AlpineJS/HTMX for the interactivity. It has been great, although much slower to implement.
The largest one has around 250 views, of maybe 80 are just basic admin views. It is basically comparable to an ERP of a medium-side company with various levels of permissions etc. I was able to get most of the functionality into production in just one month -- I was not working full-time at that time. I have estimated it with some friends, and such an ERP in the corporate world would normally take a team two years to do -- one to spec and another to implement.
It has 1-2M monthly page views depending on the season, and the highest hitting pages are read-only and heavily cached, so the server load is minimal. I am further increasing the performance by making those pages static HTML using django-distill and using Cloudflare to cache/serve them.
The key thing is to keep things as simple as possible. I avoid REST/heavy frontend frameworks whenever possible. For most views for most apps, normal HTML form request-response user interface based on Bootstrap is perfectly fine.
I started by sprinkling Javascript when it was really needed, for example client side sorting so I can avoid server load. Now I use AlpineJS/HTMX for the interactivity. It has been great, although much slower to implement.