Grace Periods Explained

When the Migration Wizard brings your supporters across, everyone gets access straight away — their own private feed, working the same day. The grace period is how long that access lasts while they set up payment with you. It is what lets you move everyone at once without asking anyone to pay first.

Choosing a Length

You choose the grace period in the wizard: 30, 60 or 90 days, 30 by default. It applies to the whole import, and the deadline is counted from the day of the import.

A longer grace period gives people more time and more chances to see your emails. A shorter one gets the move finished sooner. Either way, nobody loses anything on the day of the import.

Migrated people count toward your plan’s subscriber limit from the day they are imported, not from the day they pay — they hold active access to a paid tier during their grace period. The wizard checks this before importing anybody and refuses an import that would take you over the limit.

Free Members Have No Deadline

Anyone you brought across from a free tier owes you nothing, so they have no grace period at all: no deadline, no payment link, no reminder or final warning, and their access never ends. What decides it is that you marked their old tier as free when mapping tiers.

Reminders Before the Deadline

With the migration email sequence switched on, people who have not signed up get two nudges before their deadline:

• A reminder — 7 days before on a 30-day grace period, 14 days before on 60 or 90 days.
• A final warning — 3 days before.

You can change both in the wizard. Each is sent once, and only to people who still have not signed up; anyone who has finished the move by then is left alone.

Expect them around those days rather than exactly on them. WordPress runs scheduled jobs when your site gets visits, so a quiet site can skip a day; the reminders allow a day either side so nobody is missed. On a short grace period the two can fall on the same day, and then the final warning is the one that goes.

A migration never sends one person more than one email a day. If you resend someone’s welcome email from the dashboard during one of these windows, it takes the place of that reminder.

See Migration Email Sequence for what each email says.

When the Deadline Passes

Once a day, Benecaster checks for people whose deadline has passed without them signing up. For each one:

• Their private access ends. Their feed link keeps working but now serves only your public episodes — they hear what anyone else would.
• Their account is kept. Nothing about them is deleted.
• They are sent an access-ended email (with the sequence on), with a link to restart their subscription.
• They show as Lapsed on the migration dashboard.

Coming Back Later

The link in someone’s emails keeps working after their deadline. For thirty days past it, it still signs them in and takes them straight to checkout. After that, it takes them to the same checkout but they log in themselves, like anyone else. On a show that takes payments through MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Paid Memberships Pro or Restrict Content Pro, the checkout is that plugin’s signup page, and the same thirty days apply.

Someone who signs up after lapsing gets their original feed link back. Their podcast app keeps working and they have nothing to re-add — the same feed simply starts carrying your private episodes again.