In fact, you can get the '.city.state.us' domain for free in the United States.

The '.city.state.us' domain is a regional domain originally used by local governments and administrative agencies in the United States to indicate their geographical location, and it can be set up for free in the US. Frederick Chan, a software engineer who studies neural networks at the University of Washington, has written about how he actually acquired the '.city.state.us' domain on his blog.

Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain | Frederick's Perch
https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/

A local domain is a domain name associated with a specific location within the United States, such as frederick.seattle.wa.us. To register a local domain, you must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, an organization incorporated in the U.S., or an organization with a legitimate presence in the U.S. that conducts regular and legal activities or has an office in the U.S.

Many regional domain registrations are outsourced to various companies that actually handle domain registration. Therefore, you need to check if the regional domain you want to register is included in the list of delegated subdomains and find the contact information for the corresponding registrar. The list of registrars was publicly available online, but at the time of writing this article, the original page has disappeared and can only be viewed via archiving services such as the Wayback Machine. Furthermore, the company names and email addresses listed may not be valid anymore. Therefore, Mr. Chang had to use the old contact information as a clue to find the current operating company and actually find the contact information.

If the region you wish to register is not on the list, it may be difficult for individuals to register it. Undelegated regional domains are managed by the internet infrastructure company NeuStar , and according to government policy, only public institutions such as local governments are permitted to register them.

While registrars typically provide name servers for regular domain registrations, regional domain applications require you to prepare your own name servers beforehand. Mr. Chang introduces Amazon Lightsail's DNS zone creation feature as a way to use name servers for free for non-top-level domains.

Then, you fill out the application form called 'Interim .US Domain Template v2.0' with your desired fully qualified domain name, applicant information, purpose of use, administrator, technical contact, nameserver information, and Nexus requirements indicating your relationship with the United States. For personal use, you can enter your own address and email address in the organization information and administrator fields.

In the name server field, you need to enter the hostname and IP address of each name server obtained from Lightsail. You can find the IP addresses using a DNS lookup tool or the 'dig' command, and enter one as the primary server and the other as secondary servers.

Once the form is complete, it will be emailed to the registration contact person in the target region. Since the process is often not automated, it may take several days to several weeks for registration to be completed, and you will receive an email notifying you of the successful registration.

After registration, you will return to the Lightsail DNS zone and create DNS records pointing to your desired host, such as a web server or GitHub Pages. Once the settings are applied, you will be able to access your website using the acquired regional domain. According to Mr. Chang, the information displayed in WHOIS is that of the registrant, and the applicant's own address will not be shown.