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Licensing and Plan Limits

This page is the map of the limits your Benecaster plan sets — shows, installations, paying subscribers and total tokens — and it points at the page that owns each one.

Show Limits

Each Benecaster plan includes a fixed number of active shows, and a separate limit on how many WordPress installations your license may be activated on. Two pages carry the detail:

Subscriber Limits

Your plan carries two subscriber limits, and they are counted and enforced independently:

  • Paying subscribers — people paying you for access.
  • Total tokens — every active feed token, free-tier listeners included.

You can be comfortably inside one and over the other at the same moment. Each limit has its own enforcement setting, and the defaults are deliberately different: the paying subscriber limit defaults to Auto-upgrade, the token cap defaults to Cap.

You choose each setting in WordPress, on Benecaster → Settings → Account under Limit Enforcement, and the choice is saved on Benecaster rather than only on your site. If the license server cannot be reached when you save, nothing is stored and you are shown an error — the screen keeps your previous choice, because a preference that exists only on your site is one Benecaster would not act on.

These two settings are the whole control, and each limit follows its own. Choosing Auto-upgrade for a limit is your agreement that going over it may raise your plan and charge the card on file; choosing Cap means that limit never changes your plan. There is no separate switch on your benecaster.com account page, and nothing there overrides what you chose in WordPress.

Going over a limit affects your feeds immediately. Your plan only changes if you stay over. There is no month-by-month escalation and no per-billing-period progression — each limit has its own short window, held on the license server. If your count drops back inside the limit the clock clears and starts from zero the next time you go over, so a count that hovers around the line never triggers a plan change. The current window length is on How Subscriber Limits Work, which is where it is maintained.

The feed-side consequence differs by limit:

  • Over the paying subscriber limit — the newest paying subscribers past the limit receive your public feed, under either setting.
  • Over the total token cap under Cap — over-cap free listeners are locked out, and their feed URL returns an error rather than your public feed. Paying subscribers are never locked.
  • Over the total token cap under Auto-upgrade — nothing happens to anyone’s feed; your plan is raised instead.

You are warned before you get there. At 80% of either limit, a notice appears in the notification bell with your current numbers and a link to your upgrade options. You can dismiss it, but it returns 7 days later if you are still at 80% or above — carrying the numbers as they stand then, not the ones you dismissed. That is deliberate: crossing a limit is acted on within a day, so a warning that went away for good would leave nothing between the warning and the charge. The notice also clears itself within two days once your count falls back under 80%, so dismissing it is the slower way to be rid of it.

Full detail, including who is affected first and how access is restored, is on How Subscriber Limits Work.

Downgrades are not locked after an upgrade. There is no billing-period lockout. Moving down becomes available once you have fitted the smaller plan for a settled period, decided and shown at benecaster.com — see Changing Your Plan below. That period is a different clock from the over-limit window above and did not change with it; do not reconcile the two figures.

Add-ons

Add-ons are bought per license and switched on per show — one purchase covers every show on that license, including shows you connect later, and which of them the add-on actually appears on is your choice. See Add-ons Overview for the full detail on per-show switching and license boundaries.

Changing Your Plan

Upgrading to a higher plan can be done without leaving your site. Benecaster → Settings → Account has a Plan changes section with an Upgrade plan button. Clicking it opens a confirmation dialog: 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 proration between 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 (that figure is the plan’s list price). Confirm and you’re charged on the card already on file — no redirect to benecaster.com. If the license server can’t look up Stripe’s figure, the dialog falls back to the older wording: the exact amount charged appears on your next receipt. If you are already on the highest available plan, the dialog says so instead of offering a choice.

On a staging install, there is no Upgrade plan button. In its place: “This is a staging copy of your site, so your plan can’t be upgraded from here.” with a link to your account page at benecaster.com.

A payment method that won’t work blocks the confirm button. If Benecaster doesn’t have a usable card on file for your account, the dialog says so and links to updating your payment method — the upgrade cannot be confirmed until that’s fixed.

Downgrading still happens on your Benecaster account page, at benecaster.com → Change your plan. The WordPress admin does not offer a downgrade button — see below for why.

The same Plan changes section tells you whether you can currently move to a smaller plan. When you can, it says so and links straight to the panel. When you cannot, it says only that plan changes are made on your account page.

The admin will not tell you a date. It is not given one — it knows whether a downgrade is available now, not when it will become available. You do not need to keep checking: we email you when your window opens.

Why a downgrade is not always available immediately. Moving down is gated on having fitted the smaller plan for a settled period, which stops costs bouncing up and down with a fluctuating subscriber count. Until you qualify, the account page shows no downgrade option at all; when you do, a Switch to a smaller plan section appears there. See Upgrading Your Plan.

What Limits Apply on Free Installs

Launch is the free connected plan: 1 show, up to 10 paying subscribers, and a 250-token total cap. Everything on this page applies to it — the show limit, both subscriber limits, and both enforcement settings — see Launch Plan Subscriber Limits.

The WordPress.org version of the plugin is a different thing again. It has no license, no account, no subscriber tokens and therefore none of these limits — see Free vs Paid.

See Also

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