Refactoring organizational tool with new pricing scheme

Hi; I'm running into an issue with the new pricing scheme and am looking for advice as to how to proceed.
I'm developing a reader for magazines that are deployed in several different regions. The content for each region is totally different, people do all their work in one region at a time, and each site only accesses a single region, so datasets seemed like the best organizational tool for the job. It was very convenient to silo off the data from the different regions; it prevented editors from accidentally editing documents in the wrong region, and it made front-end queries simpler. The $20 per dataset fee was acceptable considering the number of regions we would have, so it seemed fine.

However, the new pricing (which removes the ability to buy extra datasets) makes it very clear that Sanity considers datasets only useful for different staging environments, and
not as an organizational tool. I have to refactor how everything works now, and just can't think of a good alternative. Do I create a new project for every region and just deploy the same studio on each one? Do I put tags on every document and somehow add filtering for that in the studio? Any advice would be much appreciated.

We’ve done this on the basis of ‘publications’ (or what would be a ‘region’ for yourself).
Each document type (say ‘page’) has a read only ‘publication’ reference field on them that is added on creation of a document, using initial value templates (dependent on what publication the the page was created in)

The desk is customised to only show documents that have that reference, matching the current publication (which you could do for each of your regions)

We have something like 50 odd publications right now and that’s going to grow to around 150.

We deploy one studio for all of this and it’s working really well, and Sanity’s new User permission tools is going to make this even better as we’ll be able to customise which publications which users will be able to see.

Note: I initially went down the same path as you during the PoC period, before commercials were agreed. A single dataset is working really well and we’ve even expanded beyond what we even thought we could.

Awesome; thanks for the advice. I'll look into doing this.

We’ve created tools for ‘sideways’ copying documents between publications too, while retaining a paper trail for future usage, which is great for the editors - sanity’s freedom to build whatever you want really is fantastic