Was curious about more info and holy shit, that's just the application fee! You're not even assured to get the TLD at that point.
Yeah, then if you get it, you also have to operate a registry, however much that costs, in terms of retail and maintaining a zone file, and pay $6000 a quarter plus .25 per domain for revenue over $50,000.
I always look for joke-named instances for fediverse platforms. Guess what I landed on for Lemmy.