Setting Tier Availability

Episode availability controls when each tier gains access to an episode. You can release an episode to all tiers at the same moment, or stagger access so your premium subscribers hear it days or weeks before everyone else.

This is Benecaster’s own scheduling system — separate from any scheduling or drip feature in your membership plugin. Membership plugin drip rules do not affect your RSS feeds.

How It Works

Each episode has an availability date per tier. When that date and time arrives, Benecaster adds the episode to that tier’s feed. The feed cache is cleared automatically, so subscribers polling within the next few minutes see the new episode.

Availability is checked every five minutes. An episode set to unlock at 9:00 AM will be in subscribers’ feeds by 9:05 AM at the latest. That five-minute check is for dates arriving on their own — if you edit a date yourself and save, it takes effect immediately, not on the next check. See Changing Your Mind below.

Which clock: every date and time you enter, and every one Benecaster shows you back, is in your site’s timezone — the one set in Settings → General → Timezone. Not the subscriber’s, and not UTC.

That matters for a listener abroad. An episode you unlock at 9:00 AM unlocks for everyone at the same instant, which is a different local time wherever they are — 9:00 AM for you is 2:00 PM for a subscriber five hours ahead. “Available at 9am” is your 9am. If you announce a release time to your audience, say which timezone you mean.

What “available” means: Once an episode is available to a tier, it appears in every subscriber at that tier’s private RSS feed. Their podcast app will see it on the next poll — typically within a few hours depending on the app’s update schedule.

Show Defaults

Every show has default availability offsets — a pattern that new episodes inherit automatically. You set these once in Benecaster → Settings → Availability and forget about them for routine episodes.

A typical early-access show might look like:

When you publish an episode, Benecaster calculates the actual availability dates from your publish date plus the offset and saves them to the episode automatically. No per-episode work needed for your standard release pattern.

Overriding Dates per Episode

For episodes that don’t fit the default pattern — a trailer, a bonus episode for all tiers, a special early release — you can set dates individually.

Open the episode editor and look for the Availability section. By default it shows “Use show defaults” with a timeline visualization of the inherited dates. Click Override dates for this episode to open date pickers for each tier.

Each tier has its own datetime input. Set the date and time each tier should gain access, in your site’s timezone — or choose Never instead of a date to withhold the episode from that tier indefinitely, until you come back and give it a real one. Changes save when you save the episode.

To revert to show defaults, re-check “Use show defaults.”

Immediate Availability

Setting a tier’s availability date to the publish date (or any time in the past) means that tier gets access as soon as the episode is published. Tiers set to a future date remain locked until that date arrives. Tiers set to Never stay locked indefinitely — the episode never appears in that tier’s feed until you set a real date.

If you want all tiers to get access at the same time, set the same date across all tiers — or set all offsets to zero in your show defaults.

Common Configurations

Early access for premium subscribers

Set Premium to the publish date and Basic/Free to 3–14 days later. Premium subscribers hear each episode immediately; everyone else hears it after the delay. This is the most common use of availability scheduling.

Simultaneous release to all tiers

Set all tier offsets to zero. Every subscriber gets every episode at the same time — availability still controls when the episode goes live in feeds, but there’s no stagger.

Evergreen back catalog

Leave back-catalog episodes with all tiers at the same date (typically their original publish date). New episodes stagger. Subscribers who join today get immediate access to everything already published, and staggered access to new releases going forward.

Premium-only episodes

Set Basic and Free tiers to “Never.” Only Premium subscribers see the episode in their feed. Useful for bonus content that’s genuinely exclusive rather than just early.

Availability and the Episode Page

Availability dates control when an episode appears in RSS feeds. The episode page on your website has a separate “Web publish date” — the date the episode page becomes publicly visible on the site.

These two settings are independent. A common pattern is to publish the episode page on the web immediately (so it appears in your site archive and is shareable) while the RSS feed access is staggered per tier.

Availability and Email Notifications

If you have the Email Editor add-on installed and episode notifications enabled, Benecaster sends subscribers an email when an episode becomes available to their tier. Each tier gets the email at its own availability time — Premium subscribers get notified immediately, Basic subscribers get notified three days later, and so on.

See Episode Notifications for setup.

Changing Your Mind

A date change takes effect immediately, in either direction. Saving an episode’s availability clears that show’s feed cache right away — there’s no waiting for the five-minute check above. Move a tier’s date earlier and the episode appears in that tier’s feed on the next request. Move it later — even back past a date that already passed — and it disappears just as fast, whether you’re fixing an episode you meant to hold back or reconsidering something you’d already released.

For example: if you accidentally leave Free at the publish date instead of your usual delay, catch it, and change Free’s date to two weeks out, the episode comes back out of the Free feed as soon as you save. You don’t need to wait for anything, and there’s no separate “undo.”

The one thing you can’t take back is a copy someone already has. Once a subscriber’s podcast app has fetched the episode — downloaded the audio, or just cached that RSS entry — pulling the availability date back doesn’t reach into their device and remove it. New requests to that tier’s feed stop returning the episode; whatever already went out stays out. The faster you catch a mistake, the fewer people this applies to.

What Availability Does Not Do

Availability does not replace your membership plugin’s subscription gating. A subscriber still needs an active subscription at the right tier to have a feed at all. Availability controls the episode schedule within the feed — it assumes the subscriber already has feed access.

Availability is not the same as your membership plugin’s drip feature. Membership plugin drip rules apply to WordPress page/post access — they hide pages on your website based on how long someone has been a member. They have no effect on Benecaster’s RSS feeds. Use Benecaster availability dates to control when episodes appear in feeds. See Content Drip and Membership Plugins.