The Account Panel

The Account panel lives at Benecaster → Settings → Account. It has four parts: License, Plan Usage, Telemetry, and My Profile.

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License

Shows this show’s connection status and the site it is connected to. Benecaster does not use license keys — you connect a show to your Benecaster account and a token is issued for it, so there is no key to copy, store, or paste into a second site.

From here you can connect a show that is not yet connected, or deactivate an existing connection to move it to a different site. Deactivating stops subscriber delivery for that show straight away — their feed URLs return an error, and the audio stops downloading, until you reconnect. It is fully recoverable: your subscriber records, feed tokens and history are kept, reconnecting issues a fresh token, and delivery resumes on the same URLs with nothing for your subscribers to do. Your public feed and follower feeds are unaffected throughout. See Deactivating Your Site Connection.

See Connecting Your Site to Benecaster for step-by-step instructions.

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Plan Usage

The Account panel shows how much of your plan quota you are using. Which rows appear depends on whether a license is active:

Without a license (WordPress.org install):

The 100 is the cap, and it applies per show. On an install with no Benecaster account, the follower signup form stops accepting new followers once a show reaches 100 of them, and shows you a prompt instead. Existing followers keep working and nothing is switched off — the form simply stops taking new ones. The ceiling is displayed so you can see it coming, rather than finding out when signups stop.

It is not configurable. There is no setting and no filter — the cap is fixed at 100 deliberately.

Connecting a show removes the ceiling, because your plan’s total token cap governs from then on and followers count against it like any other feed token. See How subscriber limits work.

The Followers row is omitted on licensed installs — the site-level subscriber-limit and total-token rows below the portfolio card serve as the primary quota UI.

With a license:

How limits display by plan:

If you are approaching your subscriber limit, a prompt appears in this panel suggesting you upgrade before you hit the cap. See Upgrading Your Plan.

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Telemetry

This sub-section is only visible when a license is active. It contains two opt-in checkboxes for sharing anonymous usage data with the Benecaster team.

Both flags default to off. You are never opted in without taking action.

Share Anonymous Usage Data

When on, Benecaster periodically sends a small anonymous payload to the license server. What is included:

• Episode count and show count
• Average episode duration and total content hours
• Show age in days
• Whether the setup wizard was completed
• Web player play count (aggregate, no subscriber identity)
• Add-ons your license includes, by slug
• Add-ons you use — which of those are switched on for at least one show, by slug
• Why you switched an add-on off — only if you answered the optional question on Settings → Add-ons: the add-on, the reason you picked, any comment you typed, and when. Each answer is sent once, then deleted from your site
• Add-on plugins on your site — which Benecaster add-on plugins are installed and active, and which are installed but deactivated, by slug, read from your Plugins screen whatever your license includes
• Membership bridge — which membership plugin gates your paid feeds, by slug only (memberpress, woo-subscriptions, paid-memberships, restrict-content, or benecaster_builtin). Shows with no bridge configured are excluded
• Tier breakdown — subscriber counts per tier, by tier slug
• Your revenue telemetry opt-in flag

If the Transcription add-on is active, a further block covers minutes transcribed, import methods, and how much editing transcripts receive. Transcript content is never sent.

No subscriber identities, episode titles, IP addresses, or feed URLs are ever included.

See Sharing Anonymous Usage Data for a walkthrough of both toggles, or Privacy and GDPR for the field-by-field tables.

Also Share an Estimated Monthly Recurring Revenue Figure

When on, Benecaster also sends an estimated MRR figure in cents. The estimate is calculated as: bridge tier price × subscriber count. No payment processor data is accessed — this is a rough figure derived from what Benecaster already knows about your subscriber counts and tier pricing.

This checkbox is disabled until the base telemetry checkbox is on. If you turn the base flag off, the revenue flag is automatically cleared server-side.

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My Profile

My Profile is your own WordPress account — first name, last name, display name, email address, and a Change Password block. It is not connected to any show, and it is not a license feature.

Two things about where it appears are deliberate, not oversights:

• It is not license-gated. My Profile renders on an unlicensed install too, in the same place Telemetry would be if a license were active. Editing your own WordPress account has nothing to do with your plan.
• It still renders if the license check fails. A network problem talking to the license server does not take this section down with it.

My Profile sits at the bottom of the panel — below Telemetry when a license is active, or right after Plan Usage when it is not, since Telemetry does not appear on an unlicensed install.

Editing your name and email

First name, last name, and display name save immediately. Changing your email address does not take effect right away. Saving a new address sends a confirmation link to that new address; your account keeps using the old address until you click the link. This protects you from a typo locking you out of your own account.

While a change is waiting on confirmation, the panel shows the address it is waiting on. If someone else registers that same address on your site before you confirm, the change fails and you are asked to try a different one.

You cannot reuse an email address that is already on the account of another user on your site.

These are the details of your WordPress user on this site. The name, email and billing address on your Benecaster account — the ones on your invoices — are changed on benecaster.com instead; see Your Details, and for the email address, Changing Your Account Email.

Changing your password

A Weak / Fair / Strong rating appears as you type a new password. It is guidance only — it never blocks you from saving. The only enforced rule is a twelve-character minimum.

If you already have a password on this WordPress account, you will be asked for your current one before a new password is accepted. If your account has never had a password — because a subscriber-provisioning flow created it for you — that field will not appear, since there would be nothing to confirm.

This is not a replacement for wp-admin

You keep full wp-admin/profile.php access as an administrator. My Profile is a convenience — a faster place to update your own account without leaving the Benecaster settings screen — not a replacement for the WordPress profile screen.