Price Change Considerations

When you change the price of a Built-in Membership tier or buy-up and choose to move existing subscribers onto it, Benecaster handles the mechanics — the notice period, the reminder, the timing of the first charge at the new price. Whether that notice is enough, under the law that applies to you and under your own terms, is not something Benecaster can answer. This page lists things worth thinking about. It is not legal advice and it contains no wording to copy. Talk to an attorney who knows the rules where you and your subscribers live.

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What Benecaster Does and Does Not Do

Benecaster lets you choose, per price change, to keep existing subscribers on their old rate or move them to the new one with a set number of days’ notice and an optional reminder email. It sends the notice, sends the reminder if you turn it on, bills renewals inside the notice window at the old price, and starts the new price at the first renewal after the notice ends. See Built-in Membership for how the choice works.

What Benecaster does not do: decide whether your chosen notice period is legally sufficient, check it against your own terms of service, or tell you which jurisdictions require notice before a price increase reaches an existing subscriber. That judgment is yours to make, ideally with an attorney, before you save the change.

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Points to Think About With Your Attorney

Notice periods. Some jurisdictions set a minimum number of days’ notice before a price increase can reach an existing subscriber, and the minimum varies by place and sometimes by how large the increase is. The number of days you enter in the price-change dialog is not a legal floor — it is only what you tell Benecaster to use.

Cancelling before the change takes effect. A subscriber who is told about a price increase should have a fair chance to cancel before it applies to them. Consider whether your notice period, and the wording in the notice email, gives them that chance clearly enough.

Switching billing period is a second, quieter way out — and it’s deliberately invisible in your counts. A subscriber notified of a price increase can also escape it by switching to a different billing period of the same tier (Monthly to Annual, or the reverse) from their account page. Benecaster drops them from the pending change the moment they schedule that switch, and if they cancel the switch before it lands, they’re put right back into the pending change. Either way, this subscriber never shows up as Applied, and never appears on any of the skipped/cancelled/failed lists you’d check to see who was affected — those counts and lists only ever describe subscribers who stayed on the billing period the change targeted. This is deliberate, not a gap in the reporting: the change genuinely never reached them, so there’s nothing to report against it. But it does mean your notified/applied numbers can read smaller than the number of subscribers who were actually told about the increase, with nothing on the summary itself explaining the difference — worth knowing before you rely on those counts as a complete picture of who is and isn’t paying the new price.

Charging for a buy-up that people currently get free. If you’ve included a buy-up free with a billing period and later give that period a price, the people who already hold it keep it free. The price-change dialog tells you how many there are (“340 subscribers currently hold this at no charge. They never chose to pay for it, so they keep it free — the new price applies to new subscribers only.”), and Move isn’t available for that period. They were given the buy-up and never agreed to pay for it, so there is no price to move them from. This lasts for as long as each of them stays on that billing period, so decide before including a buy-up free whether you’re happy to keep giving it to them.

A buy-up’s price change reaches one billing period. A buy-up has a separate price for each billing period, and changing one period’s price asks only about the people on that period. Everyone on another period is left alone. Removing a period’s price isn’t a price change at all: its holders keep what they pay, and you aren’t asked about them.

Where your subscribers live. Consumer protection around price changes depends on the subscriber’s location as well as yours. If your subscribers are spread across several countries or states, ask which rules govern the notice you owe each of them — the same notice period will not necessarily satisfy every jurisdiction at once.

Consistency with your terms. If your terms of service already promise a specific number of days’ notice for a price increase, or promise that existing subscribers are always grandfathered, the notice period you choose here needs to match what you promised — see Your Terms and Subscriber Notices.

Decreases. Legal notice requirements are generally aimed at increases, but check whether your own terms treat a decrease differently before assuming none of this applies.

Keeping proof a subscriber was notified. Whether you need to keep proof that a specific subscriber was notified of a price change, and for how long, is a question for your attorney — Benecaster can’t answer it for you. What Benecaster does: when a subscriber asks WordPress to erase their data, Benecaster removes their identity from its price-change records. The change itself is kept (so your own counts and history for that price change don’t move), but the record no longer says who it was sent to. The invoice for what they already paid stays in Stripe either way — an erasure never touches that. GDPR does allow a site to decline an erasure request for data it needs to defend a legal claim; whether that applies to you, and whether you act on it, is your decision to make with your attorney, not something Benecaster decides on your behalf.

If you decide you need that proof, keep it before the erasure runs — not after. WordPress’s own erasure tool is all-or-nothing: there is no switch to erase everything except the price-change records for one person. What you can do instead is run Tools → Export Personal Data for that person first, and keep the file it produces, before you run the erasure. That export includes a Benecaster Price Changes section (the details of each change they were notified about) and a Benecaster Emails Sent section (the notice email’s subject line and send date) — between the two, it’s your record that this specific person was told. Then run the erasure as normal. This is an option to have available, not a recommendation to use it — whether to keep a copy, and for how long, is still the attorney question above.

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Keeping This Consistent With Your Terms and Your Notices

Whatever your terms promise about price changes, make sure the notice period and reminder you configure here match it. If your terms say you give 30 days’ notice of an increase, set 30 days, not fewer. Review the choice each time you change a price, rather than assuming last time’s setting still fits.