ReelShort vs ShortMax (2026): Same $19.99 Week, Very Different Ways Out — Prices, Free Episodes & Cancelling Compared

Media Partners Asia projects that ReelShort will take in about $1.05 billion in 2026, its first year of real profit. ShortMax, which Omdia counted among the fastest-growing short-drama apps of 2024, isn't in that report's top five. On the App Store, though, both sell a $19.99 weekly pass. I've already compared ReelShort with DramaBox and listed ShortMax among the apps like ReelShort. For this one I went through both apps' official store pages and websites, counted the free episodes on 17 shows, and read the complaints. Prices and counts are from September 30 and October 9, 2026. The prices and free episodes turned out to be close. The big difference is how hard it is to stop paying.

The Price Sheets

The App Store shows at most ten in-app purchases per app, and both apps fill all ten. ShortMax lists "Weekly Pass Pro" four times, three at $19.99 and one at $9.99, plus six one-time purchases from $3.49 to $24.99. ReelShort lists three "Subscription" items, all $19.99, and seven one-time purchases from $4.99 to $29.99. Because Apple cuts the list at ten, neither one proves there's no monthly or yearly plan, and one ShortMax reviewer on the App Store mentions paying about $40 for a month.

ReelShort's description says "The subscription is valid for 7 days" and "billed weekly." ShortMax's description never uses the word "subscription" and names no price, so the item name is the only hint of what $19.99 buys.

ReelShort's website has a fuller price sheet. Open any locked episode on reelshort.com, signed out, and a paywall lists a weekly, monthly and yearly VIP plus six coin packs. The first time I opened it, the weekly VIP was $9.99 for the first week and $19.99 a week after that, the monthly was $29.99 and the yearly $199.99. On four later visits that same day, the weekly was $12.99 and then $21.99, and the monthly $39.99. The yearly stayed at $199.99 every time. None of the monthly or yearly plans are among the ten App Store items. ReelShort doesn't explain the changes, and the page says its prices are shown in local currency "for reference only," so expect to see different numbers.

ShortMax's website has no prices and no checkout at all. You find out what it charges only after installing the app.

What You Can Check Before Paying

Both websites show each show's full episode list without an account and mark which episodes are locked, so you can count the free ones before installing anything. ShortMax puts padlocks right on the show page. On ReelShort the show page doesn't mark them; open an episode and the locks appear in the episode grid next to the player. Here's what I counted:

Across all 13 ShortMax shows I counted, the free run was 6 to 11 episodes; on ReelShort's four it was 7 to 14. Neither app publishes a rule, so it's set show by show, and the two come out about even. These are website counts. I didn't check whether the apps unlock the same episodes.

At the first locked episode, ReelShort's paywall names the price: 60 coins for the episode, or one of the VIP plans. ShortMax's website stops at "Continue Watching on the ShortMax App" and a QR code.

The Free Path

Both apps hand out daily coins for checking in and watching ads. Neither publishes the amounts, so these figures come from users. On ReelShort, about seven ads a day add up to roughly six episodes. ShortMax users describe a check-in worth 25 to 30 coins plus up to six ads at 25 coins each. That's about 175 coins a day, or three to four episodes at the roughly 50 coins an episode users report, and some say the allowance has shrunk this year. If you mean to watch for free, ReelShort gets you about one and a half to two times as far.

Paying by the Episode

ReelShort charges 60 coins an episode. It was the same on all four shows I checked, and it's the only per-episode price either company publishes. On the paywall above, the $9.99 pack buys 1,100 coins, about 18 episodes at 55 cents each. The $99.99 pack buys 20,000 coins, about 333 episodes at 30 cents each, but half of those are bonus coins. ReelShort users report bonus coins expiring, 1,350 at once in one thread. Finishing How to Tame a Silver Fox means unlocking 59 episodes, or 3,540 coins, which is one $29.99 pack. If you can watch it all in a week, a weekly VIP costs less.

ShortMax gives no official per-episode price. Users mostly say about 50 coins, with some quoting 25 and others up to 80. Its one-time purchases on the App Store run from $3.49 to $24.99, but the store doesn't say how many coins each one buys.

Neither company gives refunds. ReelShort's terms say "all sales of Virtual Currency and Virtual Goods are final," and ShortMax's top-up agreement says it "does not offer returns or exchanges for virtual products." ShortMax's terms add that bonus coins expire, with the date shown under "My Wallet" in the app.

Cancelling

How you cancel depends on how you paid.

If you subscribed through Apple or Google, cancel in your phone's subscription settings. On an iPhone that's Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions; on Android it's Google Play, then Payments & subscriptions, then Subscriptions. It works the same for both apps, and you keep access until the week you paid for runs out.

If you paid ReelShort on its website, the plan won't show up there. The web paywall takes Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and Quick Pay, but all of these are payments straight to ReelShort, not App Store or Google Play subscriptions. ReelShort's terms give the steps for these: log in to your app account, go to the VIP page, and follow the Subscription Management instructions. That needs an account. One Reddit user who checked out on the website as a guest found no way to cancel, was charged $19.99 and then $36.29, got a form reply from support refusing a refund, and ended up freezing the card. If you buy on the web, sign in first.

ShortMax's problem is different. Some users say the app took their card number directly instead of billing through Apple or Google, so the plan never appears in the phone's subscription list and the app shows no way to cancel it. A complaint on Şikayetvar describes exactly this, and an August 2026 complaint on ShortMax's BBB profile reads: "They say I need to cancel through my apple account but they bypass it and go directly through my bank account/debit card so it doesnt show up on my apple account so I can cancel it." On Reddit, the most-upvoted ShortMax posts are about charges that kept coming after people thought they'd cancelled, like this r/ReelShorts warning and an r/techsupport thread with more than 300 comments, where one person wrote they had been "charged WEEKLY FOR 6 MONTHHHSSSSS!!!! … literally almost 500 dollars worth." Not everyone has this trouble. Some commenters cancelled from the iPhone subscription page without a problem.

ShortMax's terms point only to an "About Subscription" page inside the app, and its support address is [email protected]. Guides that tell you to log in on ShortMax's website with your user ID and cancel there describe a page that doesn't exist; the site has no login. The company also goes by three names: SHORTTV LIMITED on the App Store, SHORTMAX LIMITED on Google Play, and Shortmax Innovations, at a Miami address, on BBB, which notes it couldn't find an active registration under that name.

In those threads, the fix that came up most for iPhone users with the card in Apple Wallet was to open Wallet, tap the card, open the ⋯ menu, choose Preauthorized Payments and revoke ShortMax. Most commenters who tried it said the charges stopped, though several said they didn't. Some said deleting their ShortMax account didn't stop the billing. When nothing else worked, people asked their bank to block the merchant or replace the card, and disputed the charges.

ReelShort isn't spotless here. A September 2026 r/ReelShorts post comes from someone charged $29.99 four times after cancelling. But posts like that are much rarer for ReelShort and draw far less attention than the ShortMax ones.

The BBB records point the same way. Both companies now carry an F; ReelShort's was a C as recently as late September. When I read both profiles on September 30, ShortMax's showed 149 complaints in three years with 147 unanswered, and BBB gave "Failure to respond to 147 complaint(s)" as a reason for the grade. ReelShort's showed 29, with responses to 24. On Trustpilot both sit near one star (1.2 for ShortMax from 77 reviews, 1.3 for ReelShort from 255), but people mostly go there to complain, so that doesn't separate them.

The Catalogs

ReelShort's catalog is built on live-action originals, and its founder, Joey Jia, told Deadline in June 2026, "I don't believe AI can write a great story," though he said AI helps with pre-visualization, sets, backgrounds and compositing. ShortMax's App Store listing promises "50,000+ trending short dramas and movies in 19 languages." AI dramas and animated comics now make up 95% of what its parent company, Jiuzhou Culture, produces, according to a September report by China News Service. That figure isn't specific to ShortMax, and the app doesn't tell viewers which of its shows are AI-made.

The catalog complaint about ShortMax that comes up most on Reddit is shows that stop mid-story. "Ive already gone through like five and none have an ending or an update," wrote the poster of an August r/Vertical_Dramas thread, and the top reply guessed, "I think they do it so you'll keep paying to keep updated." Shows also vanish from ShortMax's website: two that made my werewolf list lost their pages there, though both still run in full on ShortMax's official YouTube channel. Another r/ReelShorts thread complains that ShortMax and a few other apps blur kisses and blood in the shows while running much racier ads: "don't advertise spicey scenes that do not even exist in the show." I wrote about that gap in my piece on NSFW vertical dramas. ShortMax also runs inside TikTok, but its terms say a membership bought in the app or on the website doesn't carry over there.

ShortMax does have shows worth watching. Medical Genius Is Not Someone to Mess with made my revenge list, and its first eight episodes are free on the website. For ReelShort's originals, see the apps like ReelShort roundup or my How to Tame a Silver Fox guide.

Which One?

For most people, ReelShort. You can see its prices before paying, its App Store page says the pass is billed weekly, and its terms explain how to cancel. If you mostly watch free, it also gives you more episodes a day, going by user reports.

Use ShortMax when there's a particular show you want, and keep it short. Subscribe through Apple or Google rather than typing a card into the app, buy one week, and cancel in your phone's settings the same day; you still get the full week. Check your card statement the following week for any charge from ShortMax or SHORTTV.

On either app, a $19.99 weekly pass left running costs about $1,040 a year, more than five times ReelShort's yearly plan.