having a local simulator (DynamoDB, Spanner, others) helps me a lot for offline/local development and CI. when a vendor doesn't off this I have often end up mocking it out (one way or another) and have to wait for integration or e2e tests for feedback that could have been pushed further to the left.
in many CI environments unit tests don't have network access, it's not purely a price consideration.
(not a turbopuffer customer but I have been looking at it)