So you've got a side project. Maybe it's a personal homepage, maybe it's a hobby API, maybe it's the third iteration of your "this time I'll finish it" todo app. You need a domain. You hit the registrar, pick something reasonable, and... $12. Per year. For a project that might get five visits, all from you. I've been there. After racking up something like 14 domains over the years (most for projects I never shipped), I started hunting for alternatives. Free TLDs like .tk and .ml are dead — Freenom stopped accepting new registrations in 2023 after the Meta lawsuit. Free subdomain services tend to die or pivot. But there's a corner of the DNS hierarchy almost nobody talks about: US locality domains. The problem: nobody knows these exist Quick quiz — what's the difference between example.com and example.portland.or.us ? The second one is a locality domain. The .us TLD is structured hierarchically by geography: state, then locality (city, county, town). It's defined in RFC 1480 , published in 1993.…