Benecaster Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2026

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Overview

This Privacy Policy explains how Anadar Professional Services, LLC (“Benecaster,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) collects, uses, and protects information through the Benecaster WordPress plugin and the benecaster.com website.

Two separate contexts apply, and it matters which one you’re in:

1. benecaster.com — When you purchase and manage a Benecaster license, we are the data controller for your account and billing information.

2. The WordPress plugin — When you install Benecaster on your WordPress site, your subscribers’ data is stored on your server. You are the data controller for your subscribers. We never receive individually identifying data about your podcast subscribers.

This is not a technicality. It reflects a core design decision: podcasters’ audiences belong to the podcasters, not to Benecaster.

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Who This Policy Covers

Podcasters (customers): People who create accounts, purchase licenses, and install the plugin. This policy governs our collection and use of your data.

Visitors: People who browse benecaster.com without an account.

Podcast subscribers: If you’re a podcaster using Benecaster, your subscribers’ data is governed by your privacy policy, not this one. We never receive individually identifying information about them.

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Data We Collect

Account and Billing Information

When you create an account and purchase a license:

• Name and email address
• Billing address
• Payment and subscription details — billing and subscription management are handled directly through Stripe, which receives your name, email, billing address, plan, and billing history. Card data is entered directly into a Stripe-hosted payment form and never passes through Benecaster’s servers. We store only a Stripe customer ID. We never receive or store raw card numbers, CVV codes, or full card details.
• Your site’s connection token (stored as a hashed value; the token itself is issued to your site once, when you connect it, and is not stored in plaintext — we retain only a short prefix so support can identify a connection without being able to use it)
• Purchase history and subscription status
• Tax information on your invoices — where sales tax or VAT applies to your purchase, we record the tax charged, the rate, and the jurisdiction alongside your billing address, because a tax invoice has to show them

Legal basis: Contract performance. For the tax details on invoices, compliance with a legal obligation.

License Validation Data

Each Benecaster installation sends a daily validation request to our license server. This request includes:

• The URL of your WordPress installation
• Plugin version, WordPress version, PHP version
• Active add-on slugs
• Counts only, never identities: your total feed tokens, paying subscribers, followers, any tokens over your plan limit, and your published show count
• Whether the installation is a staging environment, and whether this is its first validation
• Validation timestamp

The request is authenticated by the site’s connection token, sent in the request header. It contains no subscriber names, email addresses, or feed tokens, and nothing that identifies an individual subscriber.

Purpose: To confirm your license is valid and deliver the correct feature set to your installation.

Legal basis: Contract performance.

Retention: The 30 most recent validation records per license are retained. Older records are purged automatically.

Telemetry Data (Opt-In Only)

If you choose to participate in usage data sharing — controlled in Benecaster → Settings — the daily validation request also includes aggregate statistics about your podcast installation. Participation is entirely voluntary and can be changed at any time.

What is included when you opt in:

• Subscriber counts by tier
• Episode counts
• Average feed request rate per subscriber
• Geographic distribution of subscribers: country and region/state totals only (e.g., “45 subscribers in Texas”) — never individual subscriber locations
• Listening pattern distributions (hour-of-day and day-of-week totals across all subscribers)
• Podcast app distribution
• Subscriber tenure distribution in buckets (0–30 days, 31–90 days, 91–365 days, 365+ days)
• Aggregate churn rate and episode reach rate
• Which membership plugins are active on your site (plugin names only)
• Which Benecaster add-ons you have switched on, and which Benecaster add-on plugins are installed and active or installed but deactivated (add-on names only)
• If you choose to answer when asked why you switched an add-on off: the add-on, the reason you picked from a fixed list, any comment you typed, and when you answered. The comment is free text, so it contains whatever you write in it

What is never included:

• Subscriber email addresses, names, or any individual identifiers
• Individual feed tokens or private RSS URLs
• Individual download records
• Any data that could identify a specific subscriber

Purpose: To improve the product and generate platform-wide benchmark analytics. Benchmarks are surfaced back to customers (e.g., “your churn rate compared to the platform median across all Benecaster sites”).

Legal basis: Consent. Customers who do not opt in transmit only the validation data in the previous section — no subscriber-related data of any kind.

Your answers about switching an add-on off are kept against your licence, so we can see which add-ons are falling short and why. They are read by our team only, never published and never used in benchmarks.

Retention: Telemetry snapshots, and any answers you gave about switching an add-on off, are retained for 24 months, then purged.

Support Communications

If you contact us for support, we may receive your email address, account details, and the content of your request. This data is processed by our support platform and retained in accordance with that platform’s policies.

Academic Program Applications

If you apply to our Academic Program, we collect your name, email address, institution, role, podcast name and URL, the plan you’re applying for, and a letterhead document you upload to confirm your institutional affiliation.

Where AI-assisted review is in use, your application details and letterhead are sent to Anthropic’s API to help evaluate eligibility. Anthropic processes this data on our behalf as a data processor and does not use it to train its models. The resulting decision and reasoning are stored on your application. Applications that AI review cannot confidently approve are escalated to a member of our team for manual review — the AI itself never rejects an application.

Purpose: To evaluate and administer Academic Program eligibility.

Legal basis: Consent (submitting an application) and legitimate interest (administering the program).

Retention: See Data Retention below.

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Data the Plugin Stores (We Never Receive This)

The Benecaster plugin stores the following data about your subscribers on your WordPress server. This data never leaves your server — it is not transmitted to benecaster.com or any other party by Benecaster.

• Subscriber email addresses (through WordPress user accounts)
• RSS feed tokens, each stored in two forms: a SHA-256 hash, which is what incoming feed requests are checked against, and an encrypted copy, which lets a subscriber see their own feed URL on their account page and lets you re-send it to them (see Feed URL storage below)
• Subscription tier and status
• Last feed access timestamp
• Geographic location: country and region/state derived from IP address at first feed access — the raw IP address is discarded immediately after the lookup; only country code and region code are stored
• Download history (if you enable the optional download proxy): episode, timestamp, podcast app, geographic data, and a hashed IP (SHA-256 with a site-specific salt — not reversible to the original IP)
• Email preferences and unsubscribe state

Feed URL storage: A subscriber’s private feed URL contains their feed token. The plugin checks feed requests against a hash of the token, and also keeps a copy encrypted with libsodium so the subscriber can retrieve their URL without replacing it. The encryption key is random, unique to your site, and stored in your WordPress database’s options table, or in wp-config.php if you choose to define it there. No screen in your WordPress admin displays a subscriber’s working feed URL.

• The plugin’s own backups contain the encrypted copies but not the key, so they do not expose readable feed URLs.
• A subscriber’s personal data export contains neither the hash nor the encrypted copy.
• A full backup of your WordPress database contains both the encrypted copies and the key (unless the key is in wp-config.php), so anyone who obtains one can recover your subscribers’ feed URLs. Protect full database backups accordingly.

A feed URL gives access to podcast audio only. It is not a password to any account and carries no payment information. If a full database backup is exposed, every subscriber’s feed URL on a show can be replaced; contact Benecaster support.

Geographic data handling: IP lookups are performed using a MaxMind GeoLite2-City database stored locally on your server. No IP addresses are sent to MaxMind or any third party. The database provides city, postal code, and coordinate data, but Benecaster deliberately does not extract or store anything below the country/region level.

Your responsibility as a podcaster: You are responsible for disclosing to your subscribers how you collect and use their data, including geographic data derived from IP addresses. This is standard practice for podcast analytics and is handled the same way by podcast hosting providers. See our support documentation for suggested privacy disclosure language you can use in your own privacy policy.

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How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Deliver and maintain your Benecaster license
• Process payments and send billing confirmations, receipts, and renewal notices
• Send operational emails about your license (threshold notifications, upgrade eligibility notices, plan changes)
• Respond to support requests
• Improve the product (with your consent, using aggregate telemetry data)
• Generate anonymized platform-wide benchmarks available to all customers

We do not:

• Sell your personal data to any third party
• Use your data for advertising purposes
• Access subscriber data stored on your WordPress installation

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Third-Party Services

Stripe operates under its own privacy policy. We encourage you to review it. Stripe is bound by contractual obligations to process your data only as directed and to maintain appropriate security standards.

MaxMind GeoLite2: Used locally on your server for geographic lookups. No data is transmitted to MaxMind.

The table above lists services we use to run Benecaster, and we are accountable for them. It is not a list of software on your site. Membership and commerce plugins that Benecaster connects to — MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, and others — are third-party products you have chosen and installed. We interface with them; we do not own them, receive their data, or control what they collect. See Cookies → Cookies set by other plugins on your site.

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Data Retention

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Your Rights

Customers (Benecaster.com Account Holders)

Access: Your account data, order history, and license records are available through your account at benecaster.com/my-account/.

Correction: Update your account information at any time in your account dashboard.

Deletion: Request account deletion by contacting us at contact@benecaster.com. We will remove your personal data from our systems subject to our obligations to retain records under applicable law.

Your account and your payment record are deleted too. Your benecaster.com account is deleted, so you can no longer sign in, and so is your customer record with Stripe, our payment provider — your name, billing address, and saved cards. Deleting the Stripe record cancels any subscription still on it straight away. Stripe keeps its own copies of past invoices and payments as its financial records, and our invoices are kept as described below.

What we cannot delete, and why. Tax law requires us to keep invoices and the account credit records that go with them, including the billing details on them — your name, billing address, and the tax charged — for 7 years, or 10 years for customers in the EU. Those records are kept even after you close your account or ask us to delete your data, because we are legally required to hold them.

Because the rest of your account is deleted, your name and email address are copied onto those retained records so they remain valid financial documents. An invoice that cannot say whose it is is not an invoice.

The same applies to Academic Program applications. An application, its decision — including any automated AI assessment — and the uploaded letterhead are kept for the financial-records period described above, counted from the decision, and are not removed by a deletion request. Automated-review records about the application (the AI’s internal evaluation log) are deleted along with the rest of your account; the application, decision, and letterhead themselves are what’s retained. You can request a copy of your retained application, and the letterhead is supplied alongside it. If your Academic licence is still active, its application is kept for as long as the licence remains active, in addition to the retention period above.

If an address was ever blocked from the Academic Program, that block is kept too, for the same financial-records period, counted from the date it was applied. We keep it as an audit trail and to prevent the same address from simply re-applying once the rest of the account is gone.

Coupons issued to you — for the Academic Program or by hand — are handled the same way as invoices. Any that can still be redeemed are revoked as part of your deletion request, and your address is cleared from all of them, but the coupon records themselves are kept as part of our financial history rather than deleted outright.

If you were ever a prospect in our outreach system before becoming a customer, that history is deleted along with the rest of your account — the record of you as a lead, its activity log, and every outreach email we sent you through it, sent or not. Your email address is then removed from our email marketing platform as well, and recorded as excluded from future outreach, so it isn’t added back to a marketing list without your permission.

We will tell you exactly what was retained when we action your request. Support diagnostic logs are deleted immediately rather than waiting out their 90-day window, and everything not listed above and in the Data Retention table is removed. A retained Academic Program denylist entry is exportable — you can request a copy of it the same way you request a copy of your application, through Academic Applications — and it isn’t permanent: it’s purged automatically once the financial-records window closes, after which the address is free to apply again.

Aggregate telemetry data, which cannot be attributed to a specific customer, may be retained for platform benchmark calculations. Your answers about switching an add-on off are not aggregate data: they are deleted, comment and all.

Portability: Order history and license data are available for export from your account dashboard.

Opt-out of marketing communications: Use the unsubscribe link in any marketing email or contact us.

California Residents (CCPA)

• We do not sell your personal information.
• You have the right to know what data we collect, request deletion, and receive the same service regardless of whether you exercise these rights.

EU and UK Residents (GDPR)

• You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, and data portability.
• You have the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority.
• To submit a request, contact us at contact@benecaster.com or by post at the address under Contact.

Your Subscribers’ Rights

Your subscribers’ privacy rights with respect to data stored on your WordPress site are your responsibility to handle, not ours. Benecaster provides tools to export and delete individual subscriber records — see our support documentation for instructions on processing data subject requests.

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Cookies

benecaster.com uses:

• Session and login cookies — strictly necessary for account login and checkout functionality. These cannot be opted out of while using the account or checkout.
• Your cookie choice (benecaster_ls_cookie_consent) — records the answer you give our cookie banner so we do not ask again. Strictly necessary, kept for one year, and set by us. It records a separate answer for each cookie group below (for example, payment and referral), not one blanket yes or no.
• Referral attribution (benecaster_ls_referral) — set only if you click a referral link and accept referral tracking in the cookie banner. Remembers the referral code for 30 days so the discount and credit are applied if you sign up within that window. First-party, set by us, and used for nothing beyond that. Declining it does not cost you or your referrer anything — the code still works if entered directly at checkout, and you can withdraw consent (and clear the cookie) at any time from the banner’s cookie settings.
• Stripe fraud-prevention cookies — our checkout, signup and account pages load Stripe’s payment library, which sets its own cookies (__stripe_mid and __stripe_sid) to detect fraudulent payment activity. These are set by Stripe, not by us, and are used for payment security rather than advertising or profiling. Stripe’s own privacy policy governs them. They load only if you accept them. Decline and we do not load Stripe’s library at all on those pages — you can still browse, sign in and read your invoices, and you are asked again at the point you need to enter a card.
• No analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, and no cross-site tracking. We do not run Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, advertising pixels, or any similar service on benecaster.com.

The Benecaster plugin does not set cookies on your WordPress site beyond standard WordPress session handling.

Cookies set by other plugins on your site

Benecaster does not control, and cannot report on, the cookies or data practices of other software running on your WordPress site.

Benecaster is designed to work alongside membership and commerce plugins — MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro and others. We interface with those products; we do not own them. They are developed by other companies, they set their own cookies, they collect and process their own data, and they change independently of us. We have no visibility into what they do and no ability to keep pace with their releases.

If you run any of them, you are responsible for reviewing that product’s own privacy policy and cookie disclosures and for reflecting them in your site’s privacy notice and, where required, its consent banner. Nothing in this policy describes, warrants, or accepts responsibility for their behaviour. The same applies to your theme, your host, and any other plugin on the site.

This is not a disclaimer of our own obligations: we remain fully responsible for what Benecaster itself does, which is set out above and in Data the Plugin Stores.

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Children’s Privacy

Benecaster’s services are directed at adults operating podcast businesses. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 (US) or under 16 (EU/UK). If you believe a minor has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

If your podcast content is directed at children, you are responsible for ensuring appropriate consent mechanisms are in place before using Benecaster’s subscriber features with that audience.

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Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. For material changes, we will notify you by email (to the address on your account) or through a notice in your Benecaster admin dashboard before the change takes effect. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.

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Contact

For privacy-related questions or to submit a data subject request:

Anadar Professional Services, LLC
857 Post Rd, Suite 207
Fairfield, CT 06824
United States
contact@benecaster.com