ShortMax Pricing: The Lowest Entry Price, the Thinnest Data
ShortMax's cheapest coin pack is $3.49, the lowest of six platforms on Apple's US store - but it's missing entirely from our pricing data.
Apple lists ShortMax’s cheapest one-time coin purchase at $3.49 in the US store (August 2026) — the lowest floor of any of the six platforms we track. The other five all open at $4.99 or higher; NetShort, the priciest, doesn’t even offer a $4.99 tier and starts at $9.99. On that one point, ShortMax’s pitch as the cheap way in is real, and you can check it yourself on Apple’s own product page.
Here’s the catch. ShortMax is also the platform we know the least about. The operator pricing sheet that fills in extra tiers, per-episode coin counts, and subscription terms for the other five platforms in this project has no ShortMax row at all — it simply isn’t there. Apple doesn’t publish coin counts either. So past those dollar figures, everything below is inference, and we’re going to say so every time it applies.
The $3.49 floor, and how it stacks up
Apple’s US listing shows five one-time purchase tiers for ShortMax: $3.49, $4.99, $9.99, $14.99, and $24.99. It also shows a subscription called Weekly Pass Pro at two prices, $9.99 and $19.99 — more on that below.
Here’s where that $3.49 floor sits against the other five platforms we track, using each one’s cheapest one-time purchase from the same Apple US listing:
| Platform | Cheapest one-time purchase (Apple, US, Aug 2026) |
|---|---|
| ShortMax | $3.49 |
| DramaBox | $4.99 |
| FlexTV | $4.99 |
| GoodShort | $4.99 |
| ReelShort | $4.99 |
| NetShort | $9.99 |
ShortMax is the only one of the six that gets under $4.99. Keep the caveats attached to all of this in mind, though: Apple only shows roughly its ten most prominent purchases per app, not a complete price list, and this is US pricing only. A tier that isn’t among an app’s best sellers won’t show up here even if it exists.
A search gotcha: the app changed its address
Type shortmax.com into a browser and it now forwards to shorttv.live — same product, different domain. On the App Store, the developer of record for ShortMax is listed as SHORTTV LIMITED, not a company called “ShortMax.” If your search results start pointing you at “ShortTV” instead of “ShortMax,” you haven’t searched wrong; it’s the same listing under two names.
Where the coin counts come from — and why the method holds up
None of ShortMax’s five dollar tiers come with a coin count attached. To put a number on them anyway, we lean on the one platform that does publish coin counts: GoodShort’s own App Store page names all five of its smaller tiers directly — 500 coins/$4.99, 1,000/$9.99, 1,500/$14.99, 2,000/$19.99, 2,500/$24.99 — which works out to a flat $0.00998 per coin. Reverse that rate (coins = price ÷ $0.00998, rounded to the nearest 50) and it reproduces all five of GoodShort’s published tiers exactly, digit for digit. It also lines up with two independent data points elsewhere in the industry: ReelShort’s and FlexTV’s own 500-coin tiers, both priced near $5.
That’s the model we apply to ShortMax’s five Apple tiers, since ShortMax gives us no coin counts of its own:
| Apple price (US, Aug 2026) | Coins, we model | We model $/coin |
|---|---|---|
| $3.49 | ~350 | ~$0.010 |
| $4.99 | ~500 | ~$0.010 |
| $9.99 | ~1,000 | ~$0.010 |
| $14.99 | ~1,500 | ~$0.010 |
| $24.99 | ~2,500 | ~$0.010 |
Read that table carefully: the dollar amounts are real, pulled straight from Apple. The coin counts are our estimate, built by analogy to a different platform, not something ShortMax has confirmed anywhere.
What one episode costs: we don’t know, so here’s our model
ShortMax does not disclose how many coins an episode costs — not on Apple’s page, which never carries that detail for any platform, and not in the operator sheet, which has no ShortMax entry to say it either. For ShortMax, as for three of the other five platforms lacking a disclosed figure, we model 60 coins an episode. At our modeled ~$0.010/coin rate, that’s our estimate of roughly $0.60 an episode.
The one platform in this comparison with an actual sourced figure is FlexTV, at 65 coins an episode — a figure reported to us, not modeled. Priced at the same modeled rate, that’s about $0.65 an episode — close to our ShortMax estimate, which is some evidence the model isn’t wildly off, but it’s still one real number sitting next to one estimate, not two real numbers.
The subscription: two prices, and nothing tells us what separates them
ShortMax sells a subscription called Weekly Pass Pro, and Apple’s listing shows two prices for it: $9.99 and $19.99 (US store, August 2026). What the $19.99 tier gives you that the $9.99 tier doesn’t — more coins, no ads, a higher viewing cap, something else — isn’t in Apple’s listing, and we have nothing else to check it against. We’re not going to guess. Apple’s listing also doesn’t show any longer-term ShortMax plan, monthly or annual; given the limits on Apple’s data below, that isn’t proof one doesn’t exist, only that it isn’t among ShortMax’s current best sellers if it does.
What we can do is size a ceiling on what the cheaper tier is worth. The operator sheet spells out subscription terms for four platforms outside our six, and they split evenly: half cap viewing at 2 episodes a day, half unlock everything. We model the stricter case for every platform in this comparison, ShortMax included, because assuming unlimited viewing when it might be capped would make the subscription look better than it may actually be — the wrong direction to be wrong in.
At 2 episodes a day for 7 days, that’s 14 episodes a week. At our modeled 60 coins an episode and ~$0.010/coin, buying those 14 episodes with coins directly would run about $8.38. ShortMax’s cheaper Weekly Pass Pro, at $9.99, costs about 1.2× that:
| Platform | Cheapest weekly subscription | 14 episodes bought with coins (our model) | Subscription vs. coins |
|---|---|---|---|
| DramaBox | $5.99 | $8.38 | subscription is cheaper |
| GoodShort | $5.99 | $8.38 | subscription is cheaper |
| ShortMax | $9.99 | $8.38 | 1.2× more expensive |
| ReelShort | $19.99 | $8.38 | 2.4× more expensive |
| NetShort | $19.99 | $8.38 | 2.4× more expensive |
| FlexTV | $29.99 | $9.08* | 3.3× more expensive |
*FlexTV’s row uses its own reported 65-coins-per-episode figure rather than our 60-coin estimate, which is why its ceiling value sits slightly higher than the others.
Only two of the six, DramaBox and GoodShort, actually undercut the coin math at $5.99 a week. ShortMax isn’t one of them, but at 1.2× it’s the closest of the remaining four — the smallest gap between subscribing and just buying coins.
Take that ceiling for what it is, not more. If Weekly Pass Pro turns out to be unlimited viewing rather than capped at 2 episodes a day, its real value is higher than $8.38 and this whole comparison flips in ShortMax’s favor. A 1.2× gap is thin enough that a different assumption about the cap could erase it entirely. We’re showing this ceiling because it’s built from something instead of nothing, not because we know it’s the right way to value the subscription.
Where ShortMax actually delivers: 78 free, full-length uploads
This is the strongest data point in ShortMax’s favor, and it’s ours, not the operator’s. ShortMax’s official “Watch Dramas & Show” YouTube channel carries 78 videos tagged 【FULL】 — complete dramas, not trailers or short clips. Their median view count is 60,558. Their median length is 87 minutes 30 seconds, and every single one of the 78 runs at least 49 minutes 20 seconds; the longest hits 162 minutes 1 second. Across the ten platform channels in our dataset, that’s the most substantial batch of free, full-length material any of them makes public.
Don’t confuse that channel with ShortMax’s other one. “ShortMax Multilingual” is a separate channel with a completely different posting strategy: median views of just 956 and a median single-video length of 1 minute 6 seconds. Same publisher, two channels, two different jobs — one hands out full episodes, the other posts short promotional clips.
Two limits before you read too much into the 60,558 figure. First, the two channels were sampled over different windows — 205 days for Watch Dramas & Show, 93 days for Multilingual — and the other channels in our dataset range from 41 to 917 days, so none of these median view counts compare directly across channels. Second, a view on YouTube tells you something got watched there; it says nothing about whether that viewer ever opened the ShortMax app or paid for anything inside it. Free reach and paid behavior are different questions, and we only have data on the first one.
Three limits on every Apple number in this article
- Apple’s product page surfaces roughly its ten most prominent in-app purchases, not a full catalogue. ShortMax not showing an annual plan, for example, doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist — it may simply not be a top seller.
- These prices are US storefront only, captured in August 2026. Apple pricing varies by country, and yours may show different numbers.
- Tier names — “Weekly Pass Pro,” “One-time Purchase” — are written by ShortMax’s developer, not defined or verified by Apple. What “Pro” actually grants isn’t in the listing, and nothing else we have says either.
Verdict
If the only thing you care about is the lowest possible way to put money into the app, ShortMax wins: $3.49 is the cheapest one-time purchase of the six platforms we track, confirmed directly on Apple’s US listing. That part is real and checkable.
Everything past that number gets thinner fast. We don’t know how many coins $3.49 buys — we model roughly 350, using a formula that reproduces GoodShort’s published tiers exactly, but ShortMax has never confirmed it. We don’t know what an episode costs — we model roughly $0.60, an estimate, not a receipt. We don’t know what separates the $9.99 and $19.99 Weekly Pass Pro tiers, or whether the subscription caps viewing at all; our $8.38-a-week ceiling assumes a cap that may not exist, and at only 1.2× the coin price, a wrong assumption there is enough to flip the comparison. The one place ShortMax hands us something concrete instead of an estimate is its YouTube channel: 78 full episodes, free, running well over an hour apiece on average.
These numbers move. Apple’s storefront changes without notice, and in-app pricing changes more than that — confirm the actual price inside ShortMax before you pay anything. If you want a rough ceiling on what a specific number of episodes would cost in coins, our coin calculator runs the modeled rate above; it assumes zero free episodes, so treat what it gives you as an upper bound, not a quote.