I don't get why you'd pay 0.4$ for a fake / clone MAX7219 when you could pay less than 1$ for a TLC59281 which like I said, has 16 channels so you could power up to 3 5x7 characters at the same time, so it would cost you less than 0.33$ for a digit , and the led driver ic would allow you to basically create any character in those 5x7 pixels, not just digits.
For example, you could make a smart design where you have a pcb with just the leds and two connectors on each side of the digit, one OUT (let's say on the left side) and one IN (let's say to the right) to chain digits together, and one connector at the bottom where you would plug a separate pcb with the led driver and the microcontroller (which don't have to be present inside each digit).
You plug the micro+led driver in one of the digits and when the micro starts, it automatically detects through the pins in the connectors on the left and right side if there is a "dumb" digit (one without micro+driver) to the left or to the right, in which case it knows to adjust the led driver's functionality to turn on or off the leds on the dumb digits as well. This is simple to do, basically if a digit has no controller board inside, jumper a pin in the side connectors to ground so that the micro in the digit with controller can know it's dumb digit, and jumper the pins to send power and the SPI/RS485/Whatever signals onwards to next digits. This way, one controller board (micro+led driver) could auto configure itself to drive anything between 1 and 3 digits, and each micro can just shift data to the left like any shift register until it gets command to update the digits all at the sme time.
So less than 1$ for microcontroller and less than 1$ for a led driver, 2$ for 3 5x7 digits.