I accidentally ended up running one of the new gTLD registries for a while. It’s a lot more than $185,000 - that’s just the ICANN application fee. It’s all the other stuff that surrounds running a registry that is expensive. Might be cheaper if it’s “private” registry but you’d probably be looking at as least as much again on top.
We spent well over a million dollars on the various bits and pieces that were required to get set up - this was legals, consultancy fees, and all the paperwork and so on necessary to comply with the ICANN registry agreement terms, as well as our registry back end infrastructure provider - but that was for a registry selling domains to end users. That included putting a substantial sum in escrow for “registry continuity” - so if your registry goes bankrupt ICANN can ensure the registrants of domains are not left high and dry.
A big part of my role was to try and moderate costs as much as possible because the registry owners had been talked into the whole project by a consultant who had convinced them that their particular registry was going to make them $100m a year in registrations and renewals.
My job quickly became persuading them that spending $100k on some crazy thing was not going to achieve anything and trying to stop cash being burnt before they realised the whole thing was a crazy pipe dream.
I don’t recall the terms for private registries, but I’m pretty sure the detail will be on the ICANN site somewhere. Searching for “private registry operating agreement” or something similar might surface the relevant documents.
> The evaluation fee is US$185,000. Applicants will be required to pay a US$5,000 deposit fee per requested application slot when registering.
https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...