How is domain registration more daunting than the process to get a phone number? I felt like I had to give a lot more info, time and money to my phone carrier than to Hover.
Connecting a domain name to a piece of software running on any of your devices should require nothing more than a quick OAuth flow to your domain provider to connect a tunnel to the application. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, HTTP, ports, ip addresses, NAT, CGNAT, etc in order to self-host simple programs like URL shorteners quickly and securely.