What happens if a subscriber cancels?

It depends on whether you offer a free membership tier — and this is one of the better reasons to have one.

If you offer a free membership tier: A subscriber who no longer wants to pay can downgrade to free instead of cancelling outright. Their token stays active, their feed URL doesn’t change, and the show keeps updating in their podcast app exactly as before — they just start receiving free-tier content. No action required on their end. If you want to retain cancelled subscribers on your list, prompting them to downgrade via your membership plugin’s cancellation flow is more effective than any re-add step.

If they cancel entirely (or you don’t offer a free tier): Their token is revoked and they lose access to premium episodes. By default, their existing feed URL continues to work — it just serves your public feed instead of their private one, so the show keeps updating in their app. Nothing breaks from their perspective; they simply stop receiving paid content.

If they want to regain access to premium episodes, they resubscribe through your normal sign-up flow and receive a new private feed URL to add in their podcast app.