Setting Up Early Access Tiers

Early access is the most common paid podcast model: subscribers hear each episode first, everyone else hears it after a delay. This walkthrough sets that up end to end.

The mechanism is availability scheduling — one publish, different release dates per tier, one feed URL per subscriber that always reflects what they’re entitled to. Tier Availability is the reference; this is the practical path.

What You’re Building

One show, two tiers:

• Premium — paying subscribers, episodes available immediately
• Free — everyone else, episodes available seven days later

Nothing about this requires two feeds or two shows. Each subscriber has one URL, and Benecaster serves whichever episodes their tier can currently access.

Step 1: Set Up Your Tiers

Early access needs at least two tiers to stagger between. If your paying tier is handled by a membership plugin, connect that first and map it — see Tier Mapping.

You do not need a free tier for this — your public feed can hold the delayed episodes. Availability is scheduled per tier, and your public feed is one of the tiers you can schedule against, so a seven-day offset on public gives every ordinary listener the delayed release with nothing to sign up for.

The reason to add a free tier anyway is that it changes what you get back. A public-feed listener is anonymous: you have a download count and nothing else. A free-tier subscriber signs up, so you have an email address, a token you can see in Subscribers, and somebody you can actually tell about the paid tier. Free-tier subscribers never count toward your plan’s paying-subscriber limit — but they do count toward your plan’s total token cap, alongside paying subscribers.

Use the public feed if you want the widest possible reach and no signup friction. Use a free tier if the delayed feed is your conversion path and you want to be able to reach the people on it. You can also do both.

Step 2: Set Show Defaults

Go to Benecaster → Shows, click Settings on your show, and open Details → Advanced → Default availability. Every tier is listed with a checkbox. Tick each tier that should get new episodes and enter how many days after release it gets them; leave a tier unticked and it never gets them by default. For example:

Optionally set Default Release Time just below it to fix the time of day the unlocks happen; leave it blank to use each episode’s own publish time. Save the Details tab.

Every new episode follows these defaults, so you configure the pattern once rather than per episode.

Step 3: Publish an Episode and Check It

Publish a test episode and confirm both sides:

• The episode appears immediately in a Premium subscriber’s feed
• It does not appear in a Free subscriber’s feed until the offset elapses

The quickest check is the episode editor’s Access tab. Under Tier Availability it says the episode is using the show’s default availability and lists each tier’s rule with the date it works out to. If Free shows a date seven days out, it’s working.

Choosing the Delay

The delay is the entire value proposition of the paid tier, so it’s worth thinking about rather than defaulting.

Match it to your publishing rhythm. For a weekly show, seven days means free listeners are always exactly one episode behind — a delay they feel constantly. For a daily show, seven days is punishing; two or three is plenty.

Try different frequencies. Even a short delay can be enticing for a listener.

Consistency matters more than length. An unpredictable delay reads as disorganised. A dependable one reads as a policy.

Variations

A specific episode released to everyone at once — on that episode’s Access tab, click Override dates for this episode and set the Free tier’s date to the publish date. Useful for a trailer, a season opener, or anything you want to reach as many people as possible.

Premium-only bonus episodes — on that episode’s Access tab, click Override dates for this episode, then click the × beside the Free tier to remove its date, and save. A tier with no date never gets the episode, so it never appears in the free feed at all. Worth using sparingly: exclusive content is a stronger hook than early access, but too much of it turns the free feed into an advert.

Three tiers — add a middle tier at, say, three days. Whether that converts better than two tiers is worth testing rather than assuming; more choices sometimes means more hesitation.

A full season up front, dripped out to everyone else — some shows publish an entire season at once for paying subscribers and release it to free listeners one episode a week. This is the same mechanism, just with a staggered offset instead of a flat one: publish every episode in the season on the same day, set Premium’s availability to the publish date on all of them (immediate access to the whole season), and give Free an increasing per-episode offset — episode 1 at day 0, episode 2 at day 7, episode 3 at day 14, and so on. Show defaults apply one offset to every new episode, so this needs a per-episode override on each one (see Overriding Dates per Episode) rather than a show-level setting. Free subscribers still get a new episode every week — it just starts counting down from the day the whole season went up, not from when each episode was recorded.

What Subscribers See

A subscriber who upgrades gets immediate access to everything their new tier can reach, using the same feed URL they already have. Nothing to re-add, no new URL to send.

Someone who downgrades or lapses keeps the same URL too — it simply returns fewer episodes. There’s no broken feed and no error, which is the point of the design.

Common Mistakes

Creating two shows instead of two tiers. If you find yourself managing a “Premium feed” and a “Free feed” as separate shows, stop — that’s twice the work and it splits your analytics. Tiers within one show are the intended structure.

Setting the delay and never revisiting it. Whether your delay is right is an empirical question. Watch your conversion rate and treat the number as adjustable.

Applying a delay to your back catalog. New subscribers should get the archive immediately — a delay there just makes your show look sparse to someone deciding whether to stay. Stagger new releases only.