Apps are great for many things but hosting a service for a one-off customization of a host web seem a little overkill. I want to use a sandboxed solution for things like branding and data structure since most of these things can be done in CAML.
What I want to avoid is to having to setup a SharePoint farm. Can I deploy a sandboxed solution with Visual Studio to a site in SharePoint Online the same way as with apps?