Upgrading Your Plan

Benecaster handles plan changes in two ways: automatic upgrades triggered by subscriber growth, and manual upgrades you initiate yourself — either from your WordPress admin or from benecaster.com.

From your WordPress admin: go to Settings → Account → Plan changes and click Upgrade plan. Pick a higher plan from the list, and the dialog shows you the price before you confirm — “You’ll be charged $X today, tax and discounts included” for a move between two paid plans (the difference for the rest of your current billing period), or “…plus any applicable tax — your first month on the [Plan] plan, which then renews monthly” when converting from Launch. Confirm and you’re charged on the card already on file — no redirect to benecaster.com. This button isn’t offered on a staging copy of your site; a link to your account page takes its place there.

Monitoring Your Usage

The Account tab (Benecaster → Settings → Account) shows your current subscriber count and plan limit as a progress bar. It updates on every admin page load.

At 80% of your limit, a warning notice appears in the notification center bell panel (top-right of the WordPress admin). The notice shows your current count, your plan cap, and the percentage used. It clears on its own once your subscriber count drops back below the threshold — no manual dismissal needed.

If you dismiss the notice, it stays dismissed. It will not come back on its own while you remain above 80%. It appears again only if your count drops below 80% and later rises through it again. Because a plan can move up automatically after just 24 hours over the limit, it is worth leaving this notice in place rather than dismissing it — it is the warning that comes before anything changes.

The same 80% threshold applies to your total token cap (all active tokens, including free-tier listeners). Both warnings are surfaced through the same notification center panel and behave the same way.

At 100% of your limit, what happens next depends on your limit enforcement preference (see below).

Your Limit Enforcement Preference

During the setup wizard, a Limit Enforcement step lets you choose how Benecaster responds when you reach your plan’s paying-subscriber limit or total token cap. You can change this preference later in Settings → Account, or from the Change your plan panel in My Account on benecaster.com — the auto-upgrade checkbox there saves as soon as you tick it, with no separate confirmation step.

Two enforcement modes are available:

Auto-upgrade — When your subscriber count or token total stays over the limit for 24 continuous hours, Benecaster moves you up a plan — so in practice, the next day. The change takes effect immediately, and the difference for the rest of your current period is charged to your card that day — your renewal date doesn’t change, and your next invoice arrives on its normal date at the new rate.

⚠ Moving up from Launch is charged differently. Launch has no subscription behind it — there is nothing to prorate — so leaving Launch starts one. You are charged a full first month of the new plan on the day, not a part-period difference, and it renews monthly from then on. Every other upgrade, between paid plans, works as described above.

You can now move up from Launch on your account page. Go to My Account → Change your plan. Your existing licence moves up in place, so your connected show stays exactly where it is.

Use that rather than checkout — it’s the better path either way. Checkout creates a new, separate licence — which is the right thing when you are buying for a second podcast you want billed apart, and the wrong thing when you just want your current plan to get bigger. If you go to checkout anyway, a notice at the top will point you back.

Cap — Benecaster does not schedule an upgrade automatically. What happens to the affected listener depends on which limit and who they are:

• A paying subscriber over your subscriber limit receives your public episode feed rather than their private tier feed. Their podcast app URL continues to work — it receives episodes, just not the private ones their tier includes.
• A free-tier listener over your total token cap is locked out. Their feed URL returns an error rather than your public feed, and their podcast app reports the feed as gone or unavailable. A paying subscriber is never locked, over cap or not. See The free-tier lock.

Access is restored, in both cases, when you manually upgrade your plan.

Separate controls exist for each limit:

• Paying subscriber limit: auto-upgrade or cap. Default is auto-upgrade, and the setup wizard marks it recommended. ⚠ Launch is included in this — on the default setting a Launch plan converts to Starter after 24 continuous hours over the limit and the card on file is charged; choose Cap if you would rather it did not. See Launch plan limits →.
• Token cap: auto-upgrade or cap. Default is cap, and the setup wizard marks cap recommended here rather than auto-upgrade. The two axes differ on purpose: going over the token cap can lock free listeners out, but it will never charge your card without you choosing that.

The two controls are independent — you can auto-upgrade on subscriber limit while capping on token cap, or any other combination.

Pro, Multi-Show, and Studio plans have no subscriber limit and no token cap. The enforcement preference does not appear in the setup wizard for these plans. In Settings → Account it is shown but grayed out, with a note confirming that your plan has unlimited subscribers and no limits to enforce.

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What Happens When You’re over Your Limit

When any subscriber token is flagged over your plan limit, Benecaster shows a persistent yellow warning banner in the WordPress admin. The banner appears on every admin screen until your plan is upgraded or your subscriber count drops back within the limit. It links to Settings → Account where you can see current usage and upgrade.

What your over-limit subscribers experience:

Their private RSS URL continues to work. Their podcast app receives episodes — just your public episode set instead of the private tier they pay for. There is no error, no broken URL, and no notification to the subscriber. The silent fallback is intentional: it keeps podcast apps functional without requiring any action from subscribers while you resolve the limit.

Over-limit listeners are highlighted in Benecaster → Subscribers, with an indicator naming which of the two outcomes applies to them — demoted to your public feed, or locked out of it. A paying subscriber is never locked. See How Subscriber Limits Work for both outcomes in full.

Restoring private access:

Upgrade your plan from Settings → Account → Plan changes in your WordPress admin, or from benecaster.com. At the next daily validation check, Benecaster clears the over-limit flags and restores private feed access automatically. No RSS URL change, no subscriber action required.

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Adding a Second Show

If you’re on Launch through Pro (single-show plans) and your show slot is in use:

• The Add Show button in the header is greyed out
• A link appears below it: “Upgrade to Multi-Show — run up to 3 shows →”
• Clicking the link opens the upgrade page on benecaster.com
• Creating a second show via the REST API is also blocked until you upgrade

Upgrading to Multi-Show or Studio immediately frees the restriction — you can create a second show without any further steps.

Launch Plan Subscriber Limit

The Launch plan supports up to 10 paying subscribers. A card is required to create your account — no charge is made at signup. Launch is $0 until you upgrade.

• At 8 subscribers, a notification appears in the admin and a warning email is sent.
• When your count reaches 10, a non-dismissible notice appears in the admin prompting you to choose a paid plan. The 11th+ paying subscriber receives your public episode feed rather than their private tier feed — their feed URL keeps working, they just receive public-tier content until you upgrade.

No automatic upgrade occurs from Launch. You initiate the upgrade yourself — one click, since your card is already on file — either from Settings → Account → Plan changes in your WordPress admin, or from My Account → Change your plan on benecaster.com. See Launch plan limits → for more detail on cap-mode behavior.

Downgrading Back to Launch

Downgrade from any paid plan back to Launch is available once you have fitted inside Launch for 30 continuous days on all three of its limits — 10 or fewer paying subscribers, one active show, and 250 or fewer total listeners including free-tier ones. The clock starts when you come inside all three and resets if any one stops fitting. Benecaster notifies you when you’re eligible.

Once eligible, downgrade yourself from My Account → Change your plan → Downgrade to Launch. The control only renders after the 30-day clock has run, so its absence means you are not eligible yet rather than that something is broken. As with any downgrade, the change lands at the end of the period you have already paid for.

Automatic Upgrades — Paid Tiers

For Starter, Growth, and Pro, an automatic upgrade requires you to stay over your limit for 24 continuous hours — in practice, going over today means the change lands the next day. A brief spike doesn’t trigger anything.

The window is a rolling 24 hours, not a calendar day and not your billing period:

• The clock starts the moment your paying subscriber count first goes above your plan limit.
• If your count drops back to or below the limit, the clock is cleared — it starts again from zero the next time you go over, rather than resuming.
• After 24 continuous hours over the limit, what happens depends on your auto-upgrade setting: with it on, your plan moves up; with it off, nothing is charged and your over-limit subscribers stay on the public feed until you upgrade yourself.

Because the window resets on any drop back inside your limit, a count that crosses the line briefly and comes back never triggers an upgrade.

When the upgrade fires, the plan changes immediately and the prorated difference is charged to your card that day. It covers the rest of your current period. Your renewal date doesn’t change — your next invoice still falls on its normal date, carrying the new plan’s full rate.

If that charge is declined, the upgrade doesn’t happen — and nothing else happens either. You stay on your current plan, on its limits, and subscribers past the limit go back to receiving your public feed. This is not a missed payment on your plan. You’re fully paid up, you owe nothing, no grace period starts, and nothing is suspended. We’ll email you to ask you to update your card. It’s worth doing promptly — a card that can’t be charged for an upgrade will usually also fail at your next renewal, and that one does have consequences.

Automatic Upgrades — the Token Cap

Your token cap is not your paying-subscriber limit. The subscriber limit counts people paying you. The token cap counts every active feed on your account — free-tier listeners included. You can be comfortably inside your subscriber limit and over your token cap at the same time.

Your free listeners get what’s left after your paying subscribers, not a share of their own. The cap is one pool covering everybody. On Launch’s 250, ten paying subscribers leave 240 slots for free listeners — the 241st free listener has no working feed. Every paying subscriber you gain takes a slot out of that remainder.

This has a consequence worth understanding before it surprises you: a free listener whose feed worked yesterday can stop working today without them doing anything. They didn’t change; your paying subscriber count grew and the pool shrank behind them. When Benecaster has to choose, it always protects paying subscribers — free tokens are given up first, newest ones before longest-standing ones, and a paying subscriber is only ever affected on this axis once every free listener on the site already has been.

The token cap has its own 24-hour rolling window, entirely separate from the subscriber one. Five things worth knowing:

1. The default is cap, which is the opposite of the subscriber-limit default. If you turned auto-upgrade on for your subscriber limit and assumed it applied to both, it doesn’t. Check the token control separately in Settings → Account.
2. The clock is a rolling 24 hours that resets on any dip back inside the cap — not calendar days, not billing periods. A brief dip buys a full new window.
3. When it fires, the upgrade is immediate and the prorated difference is charged to your card that day. Your renewal date doesn’t change.
4. Both switches have to permit it. Turning auto-upgrade off for your licence as a whole also stops this, whatever the token control says.
5. Under cap, your over-cap free listeners are locked out — their feed URL returns an error rather than your public feed. This is not the same as being over your subscriber limit, where paying subscribers are demoted to the public feed instead, and it does not happen under auto-upgrade, where nothing changes for anyone while your plan moves up.

If you’d rather not be upgraded, the usual place to find slack is revoking tokens for lapsed or inactive listeners. See How tokens work →.

Manual Upgrades

To upgrade at any time — without waiting for the automatic threshold logic — log in to benecaster.com and use the Change your plan panel in My Account. Select your new plan and confirm.

You see the exact prorated amount before you confirm. The upgrade takes effect immediately, and that amount is charged to your card when you confirm — it covers the remainder of your current period. Your renewal date doesn’t change, so your next invoice arrives on its normal date carrying the new plan’s rate.

If the card is declined, nothing changes: you stay on your current plan, nothing is charged and nothing is owed. Update your payment method and try again.

A plan change keeps you on the billing interval you’re already on. Switching between monthly and annual is a separate change that takes effect at your next renewal — see Billing and Renewals →.

Manual upgrades are useful if you’re expecting rapid subscriber growth, want access to a higher tier’s features immediately, or want Studio’s full add-on stack before your subscriber count forces the change.

Moving Down a Plan

Downgrades work differently from upgrades in two ways.

They take effect at the end of the period you’ve already paid for — never immediately. You keep everything your current plan gives you until then, and you can undo the change by upgrading again at any point before it applies. A scheduled downgrade is shown in the Your plan panel so you can see it coming.

You have to be eligible first, and eligibility has two parts. You can move down to a smaller plan once you have fitted inside that plan for 30 continuous days — on every limit it sets, not just one. That means three things, where the target plan sets each: your paying subscriber count, your number of active shows, and your total listener count including free ones. The clock resets the moment any one of them stops fitting.

The listener count is the one worth checking twice. Unlike the other two it counts everyone with a feed token — free-tier subscribers as well as paying ones. So a podcaster with 40 paying subscribers and 20 free-tier ones has a total of 60, and it is that 60 the smaller plan’s cap is measured against. If your paying count looks comfortably inside the limit and you still aren’t eligible, this is usually the number you’re not looking at. The caps are 250 on Launch, 500 on Starter, and 2,500 on Growth; Pro, Multi-Show and Studio don’t cap it. See How subscriber limits work → for what does and doesn’t count.

This matters most going down from Studio or Multi-Show, where the target plan may not limit subscribers or listeners at all. On those moves the show count is usually what is holding you: archive a show and the 30 days start from there. A podcaster comfortably inside their subscriber limit can still be held out by running one show too many.

Until you qualify, the Change your plan panel explains the rule rather than showing a button you can’t use — and it names the limit that is actually blocking you, or all of them when more than one is. There’s nothing to fix if you don’t see a downgrade option; it means the window hasn’t been earned yet.

Moving down from Studio to Multi-Show, or Multi-Show to Pro, adds a second wait. As well as fitting the smaller plan for 30 days, you have to have been on your current plan for a month. The two are separate — one says “you have fitted the smaller plan”, the other says “you have been on this one a while” — and both have to pass. It is the only part of the rule you cannot work out from your own numbers, so if everything looks like it should qualify and the button still isn’t there, this is usually why.

Downgrades never change your billing interval, and no charge or refund is issued when one is scheduled.

Upgrading to Multi-Show or Studio

Multi-Show ($35/month or $349/year) supports up to 3 shows, spread across up to 3 WordPress installations. Those are two separate limits and your licence is bounded by both — see Running multiple shows for the ways you can arrange them. There is no automatic upgrade path to Multi-Show from the single-show tiers — it requires a manual upgrade from benecaster.com.

Studio ($149/month or $1,199/year) is the all-inclusive plan. It includes:

• Unlimited shows
• All current and future add-ons included automatically — no individual purchases. Inclusion lasts as long as the plan does: if you later move down to a plan that doesn’t include them, they’re released and billed separately at your new plan’s pricing. You’re told which ones before and after the change, and nothing you configured inside them is deleted. Add-ons you bought separately are unaffected.
• Priority support (direct access, not a ticket queue)
• Early beta access to new features
• Migration + Setup Service included

Studio is a manual upgrade only — it is not triggered by subscriber count.

Buying Setup Service on Its Own

Setup Service isn’t a plan — it’s the plugin author personally configuring Benecaster on your site, sold as a one-time purchase. You don’t need Studio to get it, and you don’t need to be upgrading anything at all.

Two tiers can be purchased directly, on any plan:

• Standard Setup — $499. Installation, subscription-plugin bridge configuration, feed and email template setup, and your subscriber account page.
• Migration + Setup — $1,499. Everything in Standard Setup, plus importing your existing patrons from Patreon or Supercast, your migration email sequence, and 30 days of monitoring afterward. This is the same service Studio includes free — buying it separately makes sense if you want it without moving to Studio.

A third option, White-Glove Launch, is for established shows with large or complex audiences. It’s quote-only — contact us to scope it rather than purchasing it directly.

Two ways to buy Standard Setup or Migration + Setup:

• At checkout, when you sign up for a plan or move to a new one — add it alongside your plan in the same purchase.
• Any time afterward, from the Setup Services panel on My Account — no need to go through checkout again.

Either way, fulfillment is manual: once you purchase, we follow up to schedule the actual work. You don’t need to do anything else to kick it off.

If you’re buying Migration + Setup — at checkout or from the Setup Services panel — you’ll be asked where you’re moving your subscribers from (Patreon, Supercast, or “not sure”). It’s optional and just tells us which checklist to prepare for your migration call; if you skip it, we’ll ask when we talk.

If your account moved straight to Studio without going through checkout — say, an in-place upgrade from My Account — there was no purchase form to ask that question on. In that case you’ll see it later instead, under Setup services on My Account: “Where are you moving your subscribers from?” Pick Patreon, Supercast, “Somewhere else,” or “not sure,” then Save my answer. It’s still optional, and once you save an answer the question is gone for good — we’ll have what we need for your setup call either way.

What Stays the Same During an Upgrade

Whether the upgrade is automatic or manual, the following are unaffected:

• Your episodes, shows, and all content
• Your subscribers and their feed tokens
• Your settings and tier mappings
• Existing subscriber feeds — they continue working without interruption

No action is required from your subscribers when your plan changes.