I agress on the bloat. I used Sinatra for years to avoid it. But you have to also remember this. That bloat buys you code battle-tested and proven, code you eventually need, and code you cannot hope to replicate yourself. Rare is the person that writes an App these days without some kind of framework. So while it is true you get little out of the box for your initial foray into Rails, for just a few extra minutes of work, you could put into play a useful API call pattern, that is battle-tested for the same 96MB. Good luck rolling your own there. Also PHP? Hardcore hanging on to yesteryear! It is still a thing for sure, but you won’t stumble across anything nice for Shopify. Stick with Ruby, or Python (or even gasp, Node) for the most current community efforts. And don’t discount the fact that Shopify’s gems for App and API are always going to expose cutting edge before anything else by default. PHP will almost always be your long distant cousin on a dial-up modem with electricity only 4 hours a day, from a bicycle feeding a battery when the sun does not shine.