Do I need separate shows for paid and free subscribers?

No. A single show in Benecaster can have any number of subscription tiers — paid, free, or both. Paid subscribers and free-tier listeners are different membership levels within the same show, each with their own episode availability windows and, if you choose, their own private feed. You only need a second show if you’re running a genuinely separate podcast with different content and a separate audience.

This is a common assumption from platforms where tiers feel like separate products. In Benecaster, tiers are a scheduling and access control layer within one podcast — not separate feeds that require separate shows. One show, multiple tiers.

Different audio per tier does not need a second show either. The usual case is an ad-free cut for paying subscribers and an ad-supported one for everybody else — two different files of the same episode. That is handled at the feed level: each tier’s feed can point at a different audio URL for the same episode, so you upload both cuts and map them, rather than maintaining two shows with two episode lists that have to be kept in step. See Swap the audio enclosure URL per subscriber tier at feed compile time.