How Subscriber Limits Work
Benecaster counts your subscribers in two separate ways, and each has its own limit and enforcement behavior. Understanding the distinction — especially what gets counted and what doesn’t — makes it easy to predict how your account will behave as you grow.
Two Separate Limits
Paying subscriber limit — counts only subscribers actively enrolled in a paid membership tier. Free-tier subscribers, followers, and anonymous public feed listeners are excluded. This is the number you’ll focus on day-to-day as your podcast grows.
Total token cap — counts every active feed token, regardless of tier. A paying subscriber has a token. A free-tier subscriber has a token. A follower (email-only signup) does not have a feed token and is not counted. Public feed listeners have no token at all.
Both limits are based on your current active count, not a historical high watermark. A subscriber who cancels stops counting immediately.
What the Token Cap Actually Counts
The token cap often causes confusion because “free” means different things in different contexts.
The token cap counts subscribers who have signed up through your membership plugin, whether on a paid tier or a free-access tier. These people have a Benecaster feed token — a unique URL that their podcast app uses to receive your episodes.
The token cap does not count anyone listening to your public feed. Your public feed requires no token, no account, and no limit. If 10,000 people subscribe to your public podcast in Apple Podcasts, none of them generate a token or count toward any Benecaster limit.
A concrete example: if you have 40 paying subscribers and 20 people enrolled in a free “follower” membership tier (giving them access to a free-tier feed), your paying subscriber count is 40 and your total token count is 60.
Why Tokens — The Value of This Approach
A feed token is a private URL that belongs to one subscriber. When their podcast app polls for new episodes, it sends that URL to your site. Benecaster validates the token in milliseconds and returns the correct feed for their tier — no login, no password, no app update required when their tier changes.
This design has real advantages for your subscribers and for you:
Podcast apps just work. There is no “log in to your podcast app” flow. Subscribers add their private URL the same way they’d add any podcast feed. It works in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and every other standards-compliant app.
Tier changes are invisible. If a subscriber upgrades from Silver to Gold, their URL stays the same. On their podcast app’s next refresh, they get Gold-tier content. No action required from you or them.
Access is per-subscriber. If a subscriber cancels, their token stops serving private content. There’s no shared password to change, no way for a cancelled subscriber to keep accessing your feed through someone else’s credentials.
Token reset is the escape hatch. If a subscriber believes their URL was shared, they can reset their token and get a new URL — the old one stops working immediately. One subscriber’s reset doesn’t affect anyone else.
Plan Limits at a Glance
| Plan | Paying subscriber limit | Total token cap |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | 10 | 250 |
| Starter | 50 | 500 |
| Growth | 250 | 2,500 |
| Pro | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Multi-Show | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Studio | Unlimited | Unlimited |
When Limits Don’t Apply
- Public feed listeners — no token, never counted, no limit regardless of how many people listen
- Followers (email-only) — signups without a feed token are not counted toward the token cap
- WordPress.org version — the free plugin has no subscriber token system and no limits
- Cancellations — a subscriber who cancels is removed from your count immediately; limits are based on currently active tokens, not a historical peak
The Grace Period
When your subscriber count exceeds your limit, Benecaster enters a 30-day grace period before any restrictions take effect. During that window, all subscribers continue receiving their private feed content normally. You receive a dashboard notification with a one-click upgrade path.
At 80% of either limit, Benecaster also sends an advance notice — so you typically have time to plan an upgrade before the grace period even begins.
What Happens After the Grace Period
What happens next depends on the enforcement preference you set during onboarding (changeable in Settings → Account at any time):
Auto-upgrade (default for the paying subscriber limit): Benecaster schedules an upgrade to the next tier and notifies you before it fires. Your card is charged a prorated amount for the remaining period at the new plan’s rate.
Cap mode (default for the token cap): Over-limit tokens receive your public feed instead of their private subscriber feed. No automatic billing event. Their RSS URL continues working — their podcast app just receives your public episode set rather than their private tier. A persistent warning appears in your WordPress admin and over-limit subscribers are amber-highlighted in Benecaster → Subscribers. When you upgrade manually, private access restores at the next daily validation — no subscriber needs to change their podcast app URL.
Restoring Access After a Limit Event
If any subscribers were receiving the public feed due to cap mode, upgrading your plan restores their private access automatically at the next daily validation cycle. You can also trigger an immediate validation from Settings → Account → Validate now. No subscriber needs to update their podcast app.
