What happens when I cancel?

Cancel anytime from your account dashboard. Cancellation is scheduled for the end of your current billing period — your access continues normally until then, and so do your subscribers’ private feeds. When the billing period ends, there’s a 30-day grace period during which private feeds continue working normally. After those 30 days, subscriber tokens are deactivated. Subscriber feed URLs stop returning episodes entirely — unlike the cap mode overage scenario, feeds do not fall back to your public episode feed. New token generation stops immediately on cancellation, so no new subscribers can be added during the remaining period or the grace window.

If you’re within the 30-day refund window, requesting a refund cancels your account immediately rather than at period end.

Your plan limits still apply while you’re cancelling. Cancelling doesn’t lift your paying subscriber limit or your token cap, so if you were over either one when you cancelled, those listeners stay in whatever state they were already in — an over-limit paying subscriber keeps receiving your public feed, and a free listener locked out over your token cap stays locked out. Cancelling is not a way to release people from a limit.

It doesn’t get worse either, though. New token generation stops the moment you cancel, so your counts can’t grow during the remaining period or the grace window, and nobody new can be pushed over a limit.

Once the grace period ends the limits stop mattering, because every private feed stops at that point regardless of how many subscribers you had.

Referral credit: Any unspent referral credit is forfeited if you don’t resubscribe within the 30-day grace window. Credits already applied to past invoices are not affected. Refund credit — your own prepaid money — is never forfeited.

Your subscribers keep being charged unless you stop it. Cancelling your Benecaster plan does not cancel their payments, and this is the thing most often missed.

• Built-in membership: stop the billing yourself, in Benecaster → Memberships. Benecaster created these subscriptions, and cancelling your plan does not stop them — they keep renewing on their normal schedule after your feeds have stopped. (Benecaster does pause collection automatically in one specific case: when a failed payment runs the full grace window to hard cutoff. Cancelling deliberately is not that case, and never becomes it — this one stays yours.)
• External membership plugin (Restrict Content Pro, Paid Memberships Pro, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Patreon): we can’t reach its billing at all. Cancel or pause those subscriptions yourself, or your subscribers go on paying full price for a feed that no longer works.

Do it in that order — stop the billing first, then cancel — so there’s no window where people are paying for feeds that have already gone dark.

All your data remains in your WordPress database. Reactivate at any time by resubscribing — existing subscriber tokens restore automatically. Any subscriptions you paused or cancelled yourself stay that way, so restart those in Benecaster → Memberships when you come back.