Why does Benecaster serve the public feed for over-limit subscribers rather than blocking access?

A subscriber who hits a broken or blocked feed — however their podcast app handles it — is more likely to cancel than one who still has something working. Serving the public feed keeps over-limit subscribers in their app and on your show rather than encountering an error and moving on.

This is a default, not a rule. It is a per-show setting, so if you would rather an over-limit subscriber’s feed simply stopped serving than quietly delivered public episodes, you can turn it off. The same setting governs every subscriber-level access loss — a cancellation, a lapsed membership, an admin revoking access — so changing it changes all of them together, not just the over-limit case. The rest of this answer explains why it ships on.

By serving the public feed instead of blocking access entirely, over-limit subscribers still have a working feed in their app. When you upgrade your plan, every affected subscriber automatically gets their private feed restored — no URL change, no email to every subscriber, no action required from anyone.

The trade-off in cap mode is that your subscribers keep being billed during this window — they’re paying you for private access while receiving the public feed. This is true whichever membership setup you use. With a third-party plugin, Benecaster can’t intercept another plugin’s billing on your behalf; it owns its own payment processor and webhooks. With Benecaster’s built-in membership, billing continues too — by design. Over-limit works the same way everywhere rather than behaving one way on one setup and differently on another, so nothing about it changes if you switch membership systems later.

That’s why the admin warning is prominent and why auto-upgrade is the default: most podcasters want the situation resolved automatically rather than managing it manually. Upgrading your plan restores private access at the next validation, and the billing your subscribers were already paying simply starts delivering what they paid for again.