Start with the parts already written.
Pick the AppJars modules you need. You get a Maven project — Spring Boot, Vaadin 25 — with security, navigation, properties and theme already wired for those modules. Unzip, mvn spring-boot:run, done.
No license key needed. Every module runs in free mode with record and operation limits, which is enough to evaluate it.
Modules
Project
Java
Database
Appearance
plain CSS variables
Primary color
Written to --lumo-primary-color
styles.css as custom properties. Edit them later in any text editor.