Frameworks are undoubtedly helpful. They wouldn’t exist otherwise. Yet, are they always necessary? What drawbacks do we blindly accept when we chose our beloved framework again for the next project without even thinking about if it fits the actual problem? And why is it cool to consider oneself a Symfony or Laravel developer instead of a PHP developer? In this talk we’ll have a brief look at the history of PHP frameworks in general, discuss their good and bad sides and eventually come up with the unthinkable: why not try going without a framework in the first place? We will discover the standardisation that has happened within the PHP ecosystem and how it helps to achieve framework-less applications. Finally, we’ll have a look at a simple web service written in vanilla PHP. We will consider when it is beneficial to use a framework, when we should ditch them, and if there maybe is a sweet spot in-between both extremes.