$50K is kind of cheap actually. I've seen people pay $200K and more for basic CRUD websites with a little extra this or that.
In fairness, if your web app does more than CRUD, or if you expect it will in the future, then PHP and jQuery wouldn't be my first choice. I'm very familiar with how much of a mess an app can become when pursued that way -- a nasty soup of callbacks and conflicting states. As tooling around React improves -- and it's already quite good -- it will be easier to cost-effectively write a React CRUD site.
If you just want a CRUD site that works, and you want it fast, a Rails site with scaffolding will probably give that to you in an hour or two -- with almost the whole hour being spent thinking about your data model.
In fairness, if your web app does more than CRUD, or if you expect it will in the future, then PHP and jQuery wouldn't be my first choice. I'm very familiar with how much of a mess an app can become when pursued that way -- a nasty soup of callbacks and conflicting states. As tooling around React improves -- and it's already quite good -- it will be easier to cost-effectively write a React CRUD site.
If you just want a CRUD site that works, and you want it fast, a Rails site with scaffolding will probably give that to you in an hour or two -- with almost the whole hour being spent thinking about your data model.