Hi @Inkblink,
Welcome to the forum and this nice little hidden place of the interwebs where people are quite friendly 
You may be interested in given this a read: https://shapeokoenthusiasts.gitbook.io/shapeoko-cnc-a-to-z/, and particularly the first chapter on the CNC workflow.
You do need to spend some time creating toolpaths, but depending on the thing you want to cut, sometimes it takes 2 minutes, sometimes it takes hours.
Carving from an STL file is surprisingly one of the easiest things, thanks to a) Carbide Create Pro, which you can get a one-year free license for, and b) @fenrus super nifty STL to heightmap tool, which you can can a tutorial for here
Aspire for cheap: definitely go and grab it. You will still be able to send the generated G-code with Carbide Motion.