[vlod]

Personally I would suggest build it as quickly as possible in whatever tech you feel more comfortable and giving you something that will be immediately useful. This will also help you fine tune the user flow and data model. Thinking of others, opensource etc is version 2 IMHO.

If you go down the Desktop app, maybe consider using sqlite and spending some time thinking about a MVC model (or fancier if you want). This will help somewhat if you need to split it into a web app.

Resource wise (for a web app), a lot of people have raspberry-pi's lying around. It could be hosted on that and shouldn't be too resource heavy. Also nginx is the web server du jour nowadays rather than apache. I believe it's leaner.