About Dramalyst

Why this exists

Vertical short dramas are built around a cliff. You watch freely, you get invested, and then somewhere around episode eight or fifteen the app asks for coins. None of the apps tell you where that line sits before you start.

Every other site covering this space writes the same article — ten best short drama apps — and stops there. That's an app-level answer to a drama-level question. We built the drama-level answer instead: 2,841 dramas across 2 apps, each with its episode count and, where we know it, the exact episode where the free run ends.

Where the numbers come from

From the platforms

Episode counts, languages and paywall thresholds are read from each app's own public catalogue. We record the figure together with the date we saw it. This is factual metadata — the same class of information a TV guide carries.

From the App Store

App ratings and rating counts come from Apple's public search API, captured daily. Rating counts are the honest measure of scale here; the star ratings all sit between 4.5 and 4.9 and separate nothing.

By hand

Platform figures drift, because free tiers change constantly. So we install the apps and count the real free run ourselves. Anything checked that way is labelled verified and carries the date it was checked.

Two numbers, never merged

You will see two different free-episode figures on this site, and we keep them apart on purpose:

Platform figure

What the app's own catalogue says. It may be out of date. We show it because a stale number is still more useful than no number — but we never present it as something we've confirmed.

Verified

We opened the app and counted. Shown with the date of the check. Currently 0 entries.

If you quote us, please carry that distinction through. It's the difference between reporting and guessing.

What we don't do

• We don't host or stream video. Not a frame. Every watch link goes to the official app.
• We don't link to cracked or modified builds. Sites that do are a dead end — they get delisted, and they can't carry advertising or partner with the platforms they leech from.
• We don't republish plot synopses or artwork. Those belong to the studios. Every word of description on this site is our own.
• We don't rank by who pays us. Rankings are computed from the data. Commission never moves a drama up a list.

Coverage, honestly stated

We currently index dramas from apps that publish a browsable catalogue:

• NetShort — 2,000 dramas , free-episode data not published by the platform
• ReelShort — 841 dramas , free-episode threshold known for 833

That's not the whole market. Several large apps don't expose a public catalogue, so we track their size on the apps page without indexing individual dramas. We'd rather show a gap than fill it with guesses.

Some titles were reconstructed from platform URLs and may have imprecise punctuation. Those pages say so on the page itself.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — see contact. Corrections from rights holders and platforms get handled first.