Sure, but domains aren't going to be more than $10 or $20 for the year they're relevant.

Sure they are. The domain you want isn't.

GitHub.io domains, workers.dev domains, etc are all free domains.

Clever use and abuse of some startups can get you a free domain with a signup package that you can subsequently transfer out, but those are harder to find these days.

Seriously, the bad guys figure this out all the time.