Oh, you're right. 1180AUD / year + 500AUD sign-up fee.. Still a bit expensive. If I had a business use case for it I'd be able to justify it, but it's too much for a hobby, unfortunately.
You "just" need to be in their reigon, and have justification. Usual justification is that you have two upstream networks and they'll announce your prefixes (generally with BGP). That's going to cost some more money, but there's specialist VPSes for this these days.
There’s no hobbyist program but neither is it corporate/for-profit only, from what I see.
There are few people(mostly network engineers or researchers by trade and/or business owners themselves) who are assigned ASN to their homelab gears from JPNIC. Knowing the right doors to knock etc.