ShortMax Weekly Pass Pro: Five Listings, Two Prices, No Stated Terms
Apple lists five ShortMax subscriptions all called Weekly Pass Pro, at $9.99 and $19.99. Whether the pass beats coins flips on a number nobody publishes — both answers, and which assumption produces each.
The short answer
ShortMax’s subscription is called Weekly Pass Pro, and Apple’s US store lists it at two different prices — $9.99 and $19.99. Both carry the same name. Neither listing says what it grants, how the two differ, or why one costs twice the other.
That is the whole problem with answering “how much is a ShortMax subscription”: the price is public, the product is not.
Three things worth knowing before you decide:
- Apple lists five separate Weekly Pass Pro products — three at $19.99, two at $9.99.
- ShortMax has the cheapest entry price of the six platforms we track ($3.49) and, on what its own reviewers report, the most expensive episodes.
- Whether the pass beats buying coins flips depending on a number nobody publishes. We can show you both answers and which assumption produces each.
Five listings, one name, two prices
Reading ShortMax’s App Store detail page for the US store on 23 August 2026, ten in-app purchases were listed. Five of them are named Weekly Pass Pro.
| Product name | Price (US store, 23 Aug 2026) |
|---|---|
| Weekly Pass Pro | $19.99 |
| Weekly Pass Pro | $19.99 |
| Weekly Pass Pro | $19.99 |
| Weekly Pass Pro | $9.99 |
| Weekly Pass Pro | $9.99 |
| One-time purchase | $24.99 |
| One-time purchase | $14.99 |
| One-time purchase | $9.99 |
| One-time purchase | $4.99 |
| One-time purchase | $3.49 |
The usual caveats apply and they matter here more than usual. Apple lists roughly the ten most popular in-app purchases, not the full catalogue — there may be more. Tier names are supplied by the developer and Apple does not check them, so five products sharing a name tells you about ShortMax’s naming, not about what you receive. And prices are per storefront; these are US dollars.
What you can take from it: if you subscribe inside the app and later want to know what you bought, the product name will not distinguish it. Your Apple or Google subscriptions screen is the only place that identifies which one you are on.
One more piece of confusion worth clearing up while you are looking: ShortMax’s own domain redirects. shortmax.com sent us to shorttv.live when we checked on 19 August 2026, and the developer name on Apple’s listing is SHORTTV LIMITED. Same brand — you have not landed on an impostor.
The cheap door and the expensive room
ShortMax’s $3.49 coin pack is the lowest entry price of the six platforms we track. No other platform we hold has anything under $3.49; NetShort’s cheapest is $9.99.
But entry price is not what you pay. What you pay is entry price divided by how much an episode costs, and there ShortMax runs the other way. On 30 August 2026 we read the paywall position off ShortMax’s own episode lists for 401 of the 402 series we hold: not one is free from first episode to last, and the free opening runs a median of 10 episodes. (An earlier version of this article said we had no free-episode data for ShortMax at all — that was true when the sentence was written and stopped being true the same day, when that collection landed.) What we do have is what its own reviewers say, and they consistently describe the most expensive episodes of any platform we track:
- Reported coin cost per episode: around 80 coins, across four separate reports ranging 60 to 84
- Reported coin price: about $0.010 a coin, across three reports
- Which works out to roughly $0.80 an episode — against the $0.60 our own model assumes for every platform
Those sample sizes are tiny and the reports span 2024 to 2026, a period in which ShortMax may well have changed its prices. Treat “the most expensive episodes we have reports for” as the claim; treat 80 and $0.80 as the order of magnitude, not the figure.
Does the pass beat buying coins? It depends which number you believe
Since ShortMax does not publish what Weekly Pass Pro grants, we model it the conservative way: capped at two episodes a day, so 14 episodes a week. Assuming unlimited viewing would flatter the subscription, and a reader who pays on the strength of that flattery is the one out of pocket.
Now price those 14 episodes as coins, twice:
| Coin rate used | 14 episodes cost | vs $9.99 pass |
|---|---|---|
| Reader-reported 80 coins/episode | about $11.20 | the pass is cheaper by about $1.21 |
| Our modelled 60 coins/episode | about $8.38 | coins are cheaper by about $1.61 |
The answer flips. That is not a hedge — it is the actual state of the evidence. And it makes ShortMax genuinely different from the rest: on every other platform we have run this calculation for, the weekly pass lost. ShortMax is the one where it plausibly wins, precisely because its episodes are the most expensive.
The $19.99 tier is a different matter. It is twice the $9.99 tier with nothing published to justify the gap, and on either coin rate it costs more than the 14 episodes it can unlock under the capped model. If you are choosing between the two ShortMax passes on price alone, there is no evidence here for the higher one.
The monthly number, calculated properly
A week is not a quarter of a month. If Weekly Pass Pro renews weekly:
- $9.99 × 52 ÷ 12 = $43.29 a month — not $39.96
- $19.99 × 52 ÷ 12 = $86.62 a month — not $79.96
Over a year that is $519.48 and $1,039.48 respectively.
What the free route actually costs you
ShortMax gives coins for watching ads and for a daily check-in. Its reviewers describe roughly 25 coins per ad, up to five ads a day, plus a 30-coin check-in — about 155 coins a day. At the reported 80 coins an episode, that is about 1.9 episodes a day for nothing.
ShortMax series in our catalogue run a median of 60 episodes (range 5 to 147). At roughly two free episodes a day, a median series is about a month of daily grinding.
Updated 8 September 2026. Those medians were computed on an earlier state of our catalogue, before the collection passes of early September finished ReelShort and pruned unreachable ShortMax titles. Recomputed on the 1,885 series we hold now: ReelShort 63 (766 series, 13 to 222 episodes), ShortMax 61 (402 series, 5 to 147) and NetShort 42 (717 series, 1 to 114). The figures above are left as published — they were what the catalogue said when this page was written.
One reviewer independently described collecting around 200 coins a day from bonus ads and check-in and being able to watch maybe two episodes — which lands in the same place as the arithmetic above. That agreement is worth something, but it is two data points agreeing, not a measurement.
Put beside the pass: a month of grinding finishes a median series for free; a month of the $9.99 pass costs $43.29 and, under the capped model, unlocks about 60 episodes. Those are close enough that the deciding factor is how much your time is worth, not which is objectively cheaper.
What we don’t know, stated plainly
- What Weekly Pass Pro grants. Not published. Every comparison above rests on our own two-episodes-a-day cap.
- Why there are two prices, or five listings. Apple shows the products, not the terms.
Where ShortMax’s paywall sits— resolved since first publication: we now hold the paywall position for 401 of 402 series (read 30 August 2026 from ShortMax’s own episode lists). Totals in this article remain ceilings in the narrow sense that they assume you pay from your own starting point onward; the free opening’s median is 10 episodes.- Whether the coin figures still hold. They come from single-digit numbers of reviews spanning two years.
- Whether the pass renews weekly. The name says weekly; Apple’s listing states price, not period.
Before you subscribe
Check your Apple or Google subscriptions screen first — if you have already bought a pass, that screen names which one. Cancelling is done there too, never inside the app, because the store is the merchant of record and ShortMax never touched your card.
If you want the coin-pack side of ShortMax’s pricing rather than the subscription, that is in ShortMax pricing. For how the weekly passes compare across all six platforms, see are short drama subscriptions worth it.
Sources
Prices and product names: ShortMax’s App Store detail page, US storefront, read 23 August 2026 — Apple lists approximately the ten most popular in-app purchases and tier labels are developer-supplied. Domain redirect and developer name: checked 19 August 2026. Per-episode coin cost, coin price and ad-reward rates: reported by ShortMax users in 485 reviews collected from Apple’s US review feed on 25 August 2026, all resting on single-digit sample sizes. The 60-coins-an-episode alternative: our model, built from GoodShort’s five directly-published tiers. Episode counts and paywall positions: the 402 ShortMax series in our catalogue, paywall read 30 August 2026 for 401 of them. The two-episodes-a-day cap: our own conservative assumption, not a ShortMax statement.
None of this is a live in-app price. Confirm the number on your own screen before you pay.