The Account Panel

The Account panel lives in Benecaster → Settings → Account. It shows your current plan, connected account, and billing details in one place.

Connecting Your Benecaster Account

When you first install Benecaster, the Account tab shows an unconnected state. Click Connect to Benecaster → to link your WordPress site to your benecaster.com account. You’ll be taken to benecaster.com to authorize the connection, then redirected back to your site automatically.

If you don’t have a benecaster.com account yet, click Get a free Launch account → to create one. A card is required to sign up — no charge is made until you upgrade to a paid plan.

Once connected, your site exchanges a secure token with benecaster.com on a daily basis to keep your plan status current. You never need to copy or manage this token manually.

Account Section

After connecting, the Account panel displays your active subscription:

Plan — Your current plan name (Launch, Starter, Growth, Pro, Multi-Show, or Studio).

Status — A color-coded indicator showing whether the connection is active and validated. Green dot = active.

Next renewal — The date your subscription renews. Only shown for paid plans; Launch accounts omit this row since there is no billing cycle.

Subscribers — Your current paying subscriber count vs. your plan’s limit (e.g., 41 / 250). Pro, Multi-Show, and Studio plans show the count without a limit.

Shows — Your active show count vs. your plan’s show limit. Only shown on single-show plans (Launch through Pro). Multi-Show and Studio show the count without a cap. When your slot is full, an inline “Upgrade to Multi-Show →” link appears.

Add-ons — A list of your active add-ons by name (e.g., “Email Editor, Blocks & Widgets”). Studio accounts show “All add-ons included” instead of a list. This row is hidden if you have no active add-ons.

Controls

Manage my account → — Opens your benecaster.com account page (benecaster.com/my-account/) in a new tab. If you’re already signed in to benecaster.com, you’ll land directly on your account. If your session has expired, you’ll be prompted to sign in first — with your password, or with Email me a sign-in link, which sends a one-time link to the email address on your benecaster.com account. It works once and expires 15 minutes after it’s sent; if it doesn’t arrive within a few minutes, check your spam folder or request another. Use this to see your plan and usage, change or cancel your plan, update your card, name or billing address, read your invoices, see which sites are connected (and disconnect one), and see which add-ons are on your license. Your referral link is not there — it’s on the Refer a Friend card further down this same Account tab.

Upgrade to [Next Plan] → — Appears when your current plan has a next tier (not shown on Studio). Clicking opens the upgrade page on benecaster.com.

Which plan that is depends on what you are running out of, because the plans move along two different axes:

• More subscribers. Launch → Starter → Growth → Pro. Pro is the top of this ladder — there is no larger single-show plan, because Pro already has no paying-subscriber limit.
• More shows. Multi-Show carries up to 3 shows across up to 3 WordPress installations. It is not “above” Pro; it is sideways from it. A Growth customer who needs a second show wants Multi-Show, not Pro.
• Both, plus everything else. Studio sits above both ladders and includes every podcaster add-on. The CRM Sync add-ons are sold separately on every plan, Studio included.

So from Pro the upgrade is Studio, or Multi-Show if what you actually need is a second show rather than more subscribers. From Multi-Show it is Studio.

Refer a Friend

Your referral link, code and credit are not on this tab. They are on the Refer a Friend page in the Benecaster menu. See Refer a Friend → for how the program works.

Validating Manually

To check your license straight away, go to Settings → Tools → License and click Run license check now. It runs the same check as the daily one against benecaster.com and shows the result: status, plan and when it was last validated. Use it after upgrading your plan to apply the new tier without waiting for the next daily check.

Disconnecting a Site

There are three places you can disconnect a site, and you never need to contact support to do it. Deactivating Your Site Connection is the full walkthrough — how to disconnect, what happens to your subscribers and feeds afterwards, and how to reconnect.

From the site itself — the Benecaster plugin, on the site you’re removing. This is the ordinary route.

From your account page on benecaster.com — My Account → Shows & add-ons → Connected shows lists every site on your license with its show name, its address and when it was last active, and gives each row a Disconnect button. Confirming names the exact site address, so you can tell two similarly-named shows apart. This is the route to use when you can’t reach the site — it’s been deleted, sold, or you’ve lost access to it — because nothing has to happen on that site for it to work.

From the connect screen, when you’re at your site limit — try to connect one site more than your plan allows and that screen lists your connected sites with the same details and the same Disconnect button, so you can free a slot without leaving the flow you’re in.

The Connected shows panel also shows how many slots you’re using — “2 of 3 shows connected”, or a plain count on Multi-Show and Studio, where there is no site limit.

Staging connections are listed on your account page and can be disconnected there, though doing so frees nothing — a site benecaster.com recognises as staging, or that support has marked, doesn’t count toward your site limit. On the connect screen they’re listed without a Disconnect button for the same reason. A site in staging mode at an address benecaster.com doesn’t recognise is counted like any other site; see Staging Site Counted Against Your Show Limit.

Disconnecting stops that show’s subscriber delivery straight away. There is no grace window for a disconnection — subscriber feed URLs return an error from the next request, and the audio stops downloading with them, including for episodes already sitting in subscribers’ apps. This is not the same as a billing problem, which does open a grace window; see Payment Failure and Recovery for that timeline.

So free a slot from a show that is not actively serving subscribers. If you are at your site limit and disconnecting to make room, pick the show nobody is listening to — a staging site, a retired show, a site you have already moved off. Disconnecting a live show to connect another one takes the first show’s audience offline for as long as it stays disconnected.

Nothing is lost, and recovery is immediate. Subscriber records, feed tokens and history are all kept. Reconnecting restores delivery on the next request, on the same feed URLs, with nothing required from your subscribers.

Your public feed keeps working throughout, and after. So do your follower feeds. The show runs as the free WordPress.org version of Benecaster until you reconnect.