I'm not sure what you mean by prod server in this context, we deploy to k8s. We use testcontainers[1] that run locally on the laptop via IntelliJ. There's a bunch of integration tests that take a good while to boot via docker-desktop. If these tests can be sped up significantly then it's worth that $8 a month. I'd like to remind you that technically docker desktop isn't free, either. Nor is pushing tests to run via CI/CD first. That iteration cycle would take even longer.

[1] https://testcontainers.com/