I haven&#x27;t used AppEngine, but getting a heroku instance up takes less than an hour. If I did it more often, I&#x27;d think it could be done for a typical CRUD app in &lt; 30 minutes.<p>An instance on DigitalOcean would be more like 2 hours.<p>There&#x27;s no lockin that I&#x27;ve experienced on Heroku.