[shankspeaks]

It also depends on how comfortable your team is with managing your own infrastructure. If you're not strong on the DevOps side of things, then stick with a PaaS solution to get started (even if it's a bit more $$$), and look at cost efficiency later.

If you're comfy with running your own stack, then nothing really beats D/O, Vultr, Packet.Net (if you want bare-metal) to get started. With the number of self-hosted PaaS tools out there, you can easily replicate GAE on your own for a fraction of the cost, but you need to handle the Ops on your own.

It's ultimately about how fast you can get to market, and how well you deploy resources getting there. Frankly, there are times when paying a few hundred dollars per month to have the entire stack hosted and managed for you, is WAY cheaper and a better ROI than hiring people or adding to your dev workload.

In my experience, free credit programs are great, but only if you keep your tech portable enough to move over easily to someone else after they expire. A lot of these platforms offer APIs and services that are convenient, but they also create lock-ins that will force you to stick with a vendor who's cost-benefit drops after a certain point in time. At that stage, the decision you make will be between is it cheaper to refactor or to stick it out.

Hope this helps.