What happens if a subscriber cancels?
They lose access to premium episodes. What happens to their feed after that is a setting that you control.
By default their existing feed URL keeps working — it serves your public feed instead of their private one, so the show keeps updating in their app and nothing appears broken. That is the per-show serve public feed on invalid token setting, and it governs every subscriber-level access loss: a cancellation, a lapsed membership, an admin revoking access. Turn it off and the same feed URL stops serving instead. You’ll find it under Show Settings → Settings → Feeds → Cancelled subscriber feeds — Do subscribers have to re-subscribe? → sets out what each option gives them.
A free tier changes the route, not the outcome. If you offer one, a subscriber who no longer wants to pay can downgrade to free rather than cancelling: their token stays active and they start receiving free-tier content, which means they stay on your list as a subscriber rather than as a revoked token. Prompting people toward that in your membership plugin’s cancellation flow retains far more of them than any re-add step. But a subscriber who cancels outright ends up in the same place whether or not a free tier exists.
They stop counting against your limits the moment they cancel. Their token is revoked, and both your paying subscriber count and your total token cap count active tokens only — so the slot is freed straight away, not at the end of a billing period. The exception is the free-tier route above: a subscriber who drops to free keeps an active token, so they still occupy a slot against the token cap, though not against your paying subscriber limit.
If they want to regain access to premium episodes, they resubscribe through your normal sign-up flow — and their original feed URL simply starts serving premium episodes again. There is no new URL and nothing to re-add: the same token is restored, so their podcast app picks up where it left off, listening history intact. Coming back costs them nothing in friction.
The exception is a subscriber whose access you revoked yourself. An admin revocation is a deliberate act, so resubscribing does not quietly undo it — Benecaster refuses to bring that token back and raises an admin notice instead, because someone is now paying and receiving nothing. The decision to restore them stays yours.
How Subscriber Limits Work → covers what each limit counts and what happens if you go over.