Billing and Renewals

Benecaster subscriptions are managed at benecaster.com. Log in to My Account to see your plan, change it, update your payment method, read your invoices, or cancel. The page opens with Signed in as your email address and a Sign out button.

The page is organized into six tabs. Each panel sits on one of them:

If your account holds more than one license, a row of boxes at the top of the page, one per license, selects which one you’re looking at; the selected one has a heavier border. A license you have not named shows its plan and number, such as Growth (12). Two tabs work differently: Your account shows your details once for the whole account, whichever license is selected, and Referrals lists every license’s referral link and Developer updates box, each under the license’s name.

Emails that ask you to update your payment method link straight to the Payment method panel rather than to the top of the page, so you land on the card rather than scrolling past everything else to find it.

Billing Cycles

Benecaster is available on monthly or annual billing.

Monthly — billed on the same date each month. Easier to start, higher total cost over a year.

Annual — billed once per year, saving 17–33% compared to twelve monthly payments, depending on plan — 27% on Starter, 17% on Growth, Pro and Multi-Show, 33% on Studio. The annual price is shown on the pricing page for each tier.

You can switch between monthly and annual at any time. The change takes effect at the end of your current billing period, not immediately — your subscription runs to the end of the period you’ve already paid for, then renews at the new interval and rate. No charge, credit or proration is applied when you ask for the switch.

This works the same way in both directions, but the wait is very different:

• Monthly → annual — takes effect at your next monthly renewal, so within about a month.
• Annual → monthly — takes effect at your annual renewal date, which can be up to a year away. You keep every day of the year you’ve already paid for. We don’t cut the year short and refund the balance; you simply renew monthly when it ends.

Switching interval is not a plan change. Your plan, its limits and its features are all untouched — this is only about how often you’re billed.

Changing your plan is a separate thing, and it keeps you on the interval you’re already on: a monthly customer is offered monthly prices and an annual customer annual ones. If you want to move plan and change interval, do them as two changes.

How to switch

Go to My Account → the Change plan tab → Billing cycle, and choose the cycle you want.

The pending change appears on the page straight away, and the Overview tab’s Your plan shows it too: “Your billing switches to annual on . From then you pay a year. Nothing is charged or refunded today.” (or monthly). Nothing is charged or refunded that day. Billing cycle itself reads “You are billed annually.” or “You are billed monthly.”

You can cancel the switch any time before it applies by choosing the cycle you’re already on. Nothing has moved yet, so there’s nothing to undo.

If We Change a Price

A change to published pricing does not reach your subscription immediately or without notice. Here is exactly what happens when it does — the whole sequence, so nothing about it arrives as a surprise.

1. We email you straight away, naming the new price and the date you will first be charged it.
2. You are charged at your first renewal on or after 30 days from that email. Everyone gets at least thirty days and most get considerably more — if you have just renewed annually, it can be close to a year.
3. If you’re on monthly billing and your renewal falls inside those thirty days, you pay the old price once more first. That is correct, not a mistake, and it is the part that most looks like the change failed.
4. Your renewal reminder, a week before, says the price changed and what it was — so you are not working from an email you read eleven months ago.
5. My Account shows the pending change for the whole window.
6. Your Benecaster plugin shows it too, as a warning in your WordPress admin naming the old price, the new one and the date, with a link to My Account. It appears once our email has gone out and goes away on that date.

Nothing is ever charged mid-cycle. There is no proration and no top-up: the new price arrives at a renewal or not at all.

If you change plan before the new price takes effect, the notice no longer applies. It was about the plan you were on. Move to a different plan inside the thirty days and nothing is charged for the old plan’s change, it disappears from My Account, and you pay your new plan’s price.

If your plan’s price goes down, you get the lower price automatically. It applies from your next renewal, with no waiting period and nothing for you to do. We email you with the old price, the new one and the date it starts.

• Nothing is charged or refunded on the day. Your next bill is simply smaller.
• If you have just paid, you won’t see a change until your next renewal. An annual customer who renewed last week pays the lower price at next year’s renewal.

You can cancel at any point during the window and keep access to the end of the period you have paid for. See Cancelling below.

Add-on prices

The same rules apply to each add-on you pay for, timed by that add-on’s own renewal rather than your plan’s.

• If an add-on’s price goes down, you get the lower price automatically at the add-on’s next renewal. Nothing is charged or refunded that day, and we email you the old price, the new one and the date it starts.
• If an add-on’s price goes up, it reaches you only with at least thirty days’ notice by email. The email names both prices and the date. You are charged the new price at the add-on’s first renewal on or after 30 days from that email; if it renews before then, you pay the old price once more first.
• My Account shows a pending rise on the add-on it applies to, in Your add-ons: “Its price changes to $X a year on DATE. Nothing is charged today.”
• There is no reminder a week before an add-on renews, and the Benecaster plugin shows no notice for an add-on’s price. The email and My Account are where you will see it.
• You can cancel the add-on any time before the new price applies and keep it to the end of the period you have paid for. See Purchasing Add-ons.

A one-time purchase, such as the Migration Wizard, never renews, so its price never changes after you buy it.

Refer a Podcaster

The Refer a podcaster panel, on the Referrals tab of My Account, shows a read-only referral link with a copy button, three counts, and your referral credit balance, plus a link to the referral program page. See Refer a Friend for how credit is calculated.

The three counts are Signed up, not yet paying, Became paying customers, and Credit paid to you. The balance reads “Referral credit on your account: $X”. It is an account total, not a per-license one, and it is the same figure shown under Account credit above. It comes off your next invoice automatically.

Under the link, the panel has two sections:

• Your referrals lists each person who has become a paying customer through your link, with the month, their plan, the credit earned and a status of Pending or Credited. It never shows a name or an email address, so you can see what you have earned without the panel identifying anyone you referred.
• Referral credit history starts with a summary: Earned, Applied to your bills, Forfeited (only shown when something was forfeited) and Left. Under it, each row gives the month, what happened, the amount and what was left after. What happened reads Taken off a bill, Forfeited when your plan ended, or Added by our team / Removed by our team for a change we made by hand. Credit you earn is counted in the summary rather than listed row by row, and the table shows your latest 24 rows, with the totals above covering everything.

Pending can lag paying. A recurring add-on signup defers the referrer’s payout to the referred person’s second invoice, not the first, so a referral can sit as Pending for a billing cycle before it becomes Credited. If any of your referrals is in that window, the panel says so, and it settles on its own within a day or so.

Credit added by our team. If we add referral credit to your account by hand, for example for a referral that did not go through your link, it appears in your referral credit history on My Account as Added by our team. We don’t send an email when we do. It behaves like any other referral credit: it comes off at most half of any bill, and it is lost if all your plans lapse.

Your referral credit balance is per account, not per license. If you hold two licenses, both show the same balance — it isn’t split or duplicated between them.

Your referral link is minted the first time your account page loads, and never after. It doesn’t rotate, and nothing backfills it retroactively. If you’re looking for your referral link, the answer is “open My Account” — not “we’ll generate one and send it to you.”

Add-on Billing

Some add-ons are purchased separately from your Benecaster plan and billed on their own annual subscription. When you purchase a recurring add-on at checkout, you will see a Billed separately total on the order summary — this amount renews annually on its own schedule, independent of your plan renewal date.

One-time add-ons (such as the Migration Wizard) are charged once as part of your first invoice and do not renew.

If you purchased a plan and a recurring add-on together, you may receive two separate charges: one for the plan and one for the add-on. Both appear in the Invoices panel in My Account.

Seeing which add-ons you have

The Your add-ons panel in My Account lists every add-on on the license, with how you got each one – Included with your plan, Purchased, or Added by Benecaster support – and, where a term applies, a Paid through date.

Read “Paid through” as exactly what it says: the last day the add-on is paid for. It is not a renewal date. An add-on that renews next week and one whose renewal you have already cancelled show the same date, so the date alone will not tell you whether it is going to renew. If you need to know that, check the add-on’s own subscription in your invoices or ask us.

Further down the same tab, after Downloads, the Add add-ons card is closed until you open it (a link from the add-ons page or from checkout opens it for you). Inside, Add to your plan offers each add-on you do not have yet, with its yearly price and an Add button. Add-ons are billed annually on their own invoice, separately from your plan, using your saved card. Add-ons that are not released yet are listed under Coming soon, with nothing to buy. If the price of an add-on you pay for is changing, the panel says so on that add-on (see Add-on prices).

If you hold more than one license, checkout asks which one your add-ons are for. Tick an add-on while buying a plan and you will be asked whether it belongs to the license you are creating now or to one you already hold.

Answer it carefully — it is expensive to correct afterwards. Moving an add-on between licenses later is not a transfer: removing it from the wrong one credits you nothing, and adding it to the right one is charged in full on the day. On the All Add-ons Bundle that means paying twice. If you are unsure, contact support before completing checkout rather than after.

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Renewals

Subscriptions renew automatically on your billing date. Benecaster sends a renewal reminder email a few days before each renewal so you have time to review or cancel if needed. If the card on file will have expired by your renewal date, the reminder says so and links straight to the payment method panel in My Account so you can update it before the charge is attempted.

After a successful renewal, you receive a receipt by email. Your license status updates to reflect the new renewal date.

Your next renewal date is shown in Benecaster → License in your WordPress admin and in My Account on benecaster.com.

What Checkout Asks For

Checkout asks for your name and billing address alongside your email and card. The address is not optional padding — it is what determines whether sales tax or VAT applies to your purchase and at what rate, and it is what appears in the Billed to block on your invoice.

You will see the tax before you pay. The order summary shows a Tax line and a tax-inclusive Total due today, calculated from the address you entered. If we cannot calculate it — an unrecognised address, or a brief problem reaching our tax provider — the summary says “+ tax” rather than showing a figure. It will never show a tax of $0.00 when the real answer is unknown.

If you are in the US or Canada, pick your state or province and enter your postcode. For those two countries the state field is a list — State for the US, Province or territory for Canada — and anywhere else it is a free-text box. State and local tax mean the country alone is not enough to work out what you owe, so no figure appears until you have entered a postcode.

One exception worth knowing about: if you buy a recurring add-on at the same time as a plan, the Billed separately total keeps a “+ tax” suffix rather than showing a tax-inclusive figure. That add-on is not part of today’s charge, so there is no calculated total for it yet.

Combining Two Licenses

If you end up holding two Benecaster licenses — usually because you bought a plan for a second podcast at checkout rather than upgrading an existing one — you can merge them into a single Multi-Show license yourself. The Combine your licenses panel is on the Change plan tab of your account page. Combining moves the license you keep to the plan that covers several shows, which may cost more or less than paying for two licenses separately; your next invoice shows the exact figure. The license you fold in has its subscription cancelled and stops being listed on your account page.

What comes back to you — one or the other, never both:

• Within the refund window (see our Terms), the license being absorbed has its initial payment refunded in full (less anything already refunded on it), and no credit is banked.
• After that window, you get a prorated credit on your account for the unused part of the term.

Your add-ons come too, but only the ones you bought. Add-ons you bought, at checkout or from your account page, or that support granted you, move to the surviving license, and we stop billing any that the merge makes redundant. Add-ons that come included with a plan are not moved — the surviving license works those out from its own plan, so you keep them either way.

Your invoice history stays with you. Invoices from the license you absorb keep appearing in the Invoices panel of the surviving license, mixed in with its own by date — each one labeled Merged license so you can tell where it came from. Nothing about the record itself changes; it just now lives on one account page instead of two.

There is no way for support to do a merge on your behalf, by design — having two routes to one money-moving action is how customers end up credited twice. If the panel will not complete for you, tell us and we will fix the underlying problem rather than working around it.

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Your Invoices

Every payment appears in the Invoices panel in My Account — date, amount and status, ten per page. Click any row to open the full invoice: letterhead, a Billed to block with your name and billing address, line items with the period each covers, any discount as its own line, a subtotal, the tax line where tax applies, and the total.

Mid-period changes get their own invoice too. Upgrading your plan, or adding an add-on to ones you already have, charges you a part-period amount on the day. That charge is its own row in the Invoices panel, dated the day you made the change — not folded into your next renewal.

Some lines are negative, and that is normal on those invoices. When you change plan partway through a period, we credit the time you had already paid for on the old plan and charge you for the rest of the period on the new one. The credit is a line like −$49.00, sitting above the charge, and the total is the difference. A negative line is money coming back to you, exactly like the Discount row.

Quote the Benecaster invoice number when you contact us. It looks like BC-000012.

To keep a copy, use the Print button on the invoice and choose “Save as PDF” in your browser’s print dialog. Benecaster does not email invoices as PDF attachments, and there is no separate download link.

Tax on your invoice. Where sales tax or VAT applies to your purchase, your invoice shows your billing address, a subtotal before tax, and the tax charged as its own line with the rate and the jurisdiction it was charged for, alongside our own tax registration number.

Your Details

The Your details panel, on the Your account tab, holds who is billed and where. It applies to your whole account: with more than one license you see it once, and a change reaches every license.

• Name — the name on your account and on your invoices.
• Email — the address you sign in with and where billing emails go. To change it, use the Change your email address form beneath it. It needs a sign-in within the last 15 minutes, and nothing changes until you confirm from the new inbox. See Changing Your Account Email.
• Billing address — country, address, city, state or region, and postal code. It uses the same country list as checkout, and for the United States and Canada the state or province is picked from a list. Addresses in those two countries need a state or province and a postal code.

Your billing address determines the tax on your invoices and is printed on them. Edit the name or address and press Save details; a saved change applies to your invoices from then on.

An address we can’t place for tax is refused, not saved. You’ll see “We could not confirm that address for tax. Check the postal code, state and country, then try again. Nothing was changed.” Correct whichever part is wrong and save again.

A plan with no billing has no address to edit. The panel shows your name and email only, with “This plan is not billed, so there is no billing address on file.”

If we can’t reach Stripe when the page loads, the address fields are left out rather than shown empty, so a quick fix to your name can’t blank your address. Your name can still be saved; try the address again later.

Updating Your Payment Method

To update your card, log in to benecaster.com and use the Payment method panel in My Account. You’ll see the card brand, its last four digits and its expiry date, plus an Update payment method button. Entering a new card makes it the default for all future renewals immediately.

Card details are entered directly into Stripe’s secure payment form. Your full card number never reaches Benecaster’s servers.

The panel has four states, and they mean different things:

A card expires at the end of the month indicated — a card marked 09/26 expires on September 30, 2026, and still works throughout September 2026.

A card that will not cover what’s coming next gets a warning, in one of two strengths — we would rather say nothing than nuisance you about a card that’s actually fine:

• A badge next to the card — “Expires before your next renewal” on a paid plan (shown only once the card genuinely stops working before your next renewal date; a card valid through the end of your renewal month is not flagged, however close that looks) or “Expires soon” on Launch, within 60 days of expiry (Launch has no renewal to measure against, so it uses a flat window instead — your card matters there because it’s what a future upgrade would charge). Either way, a note underneath adds that if your bank has already sent a replacement, it’s usually picked up here automatically and there’s nothing to do.
• A bordered “Your card has expired” box, once the card has actually expired — naming the renewal that will fail (on a paid plan) or that upgrades will fail (on Launch), with a Replace this card link straight to the form.

Neither warning appears while your plan is set to cancel and won’t renew again — there’s nothing coming for the card to fail to cover.

If your license was set up outside normal checkout — an academic Growth license, for example — there is no billing account attached, so the panel says so and shows no button. That’s expected, not a fault.

If you declined payment cookies

The first time you visit benecaster.com we ask about cookies. If you chose Decline, card entry stops working — on the payment method panel, at checkout, and on the free Launch signup page — and so does approving a renewal your bank has held. In each case the button is replaced by a short panel explaining why, with an Allow payment cookies button that fixes it in one click.

Nothing is broken and nothing about your subscription has changed. Entering a card means loading Stripe’s payment library, that library sets the two fraud-detection cookies described in our privacy policy, and declining means we genuinely do not load it — rather than loading it anyway and ignoring your answer.

You can still see which card is on file. That summary — brand, last four, expiry — is read on our server from Stripe’s records, not by anything running in your browser, so declining costs you the ability to change a card, not to check which one you have. Your invoices, plan, add-ons and downloads are all unaffected too.

To change your mind, look for the “Cookie choices” link in the footer of any page on benecaster.com — it reopens the same banner without you having to clear cookies by hand. The button on the payment method panel works too, but it is not your only option any more.

If you originally Allowed cookies and want to withdraw that consent, the footer link above is your route in — there is nothing on the payment method panel for you to click, since your card form already works. Withdrawing there takes you back to a Decline state, and the page you were on reloads so the card form goes away immediately.

If Your Bank Asks You to Approve a Renewal

Now and then a bank holds a renewal payment until you confirm it yourself — a security check, often called 3-D Secure. When that happens the payment hasn’t failed and there is nothing wrong with your card. It is simply waiting for you.

We email you with the subject Your bank wants you to confirm your Benecaster renewal, and your account page opens with a Your bank needs to approve a payment step showing the amount. Click Approve this payment and your bank’s own approval window opens — or you get a prompt in your banking app. Once you approve it, the renewal completes and the step disappears.

Until you approve it, nothing else happens. Your plan keeps running, your subscribers keep full access, and there is no countdown, no payment-failed emails and no suspension. The renewal just stays on hold, so it is worth doing when you see the email.

A few things you might run into:

• “This payment has already gone through.” You approved it somewhere else — another device, or your banking app — or it settled while the page was open. Nothing more is needed.
• You close the bank’s window without answering. The payment is still waiting. Click the button again whenever you’re ready.
• “We could not check its status just now.” We briefly couldn’t reach our payment processor. Nothing has been charged twice; come back in a few minutes.
• You declined payment cookies. The approval window is opened by Stripe, so it needs the same cookies as entering a card — see If you declined payment cookies. If you would rather not allow them, reply to any email from us and we’ll sort the payment out with you directly.

Don’t replace your card to fix this. A new card doesn’t approve a payment that is already waiting on the old one — only the approval step does.

Failed Payments

If a renewal payment fails, Benecaster retries the charge automatically over the following days. You’ll receive an email notification on the first failure with a link to update your payment method. That link takes you straight to the Payment method panel, not to the top of your account page — every email in the payment-failure sequence does the same.

During the retry period your license remains active and your subscribers are unaffected. If all retry attempts fail, your license moves to Suspended status. Your subscribers continue to receive their private feeds normally throughout the grace window while you resolve the payment issue — nothing changes for them during it. See Payment Failure and Recovery.

To recover a suspended account: log in to benecaster.com, update your payment method, and complete the payment. Your license reactivates immediately.

Cancelling

To cancel your subscription, log in to benecaster.com and use Cancel in the Change your plan panel in My Account.

After cancelling:

• Your license remains Active until the end of the period you’ve already paid for
• Your subscribers continue to receive their private feeds during that period
• At the end of the period a grace window opens, during which private feeds continue working normally
• When that window closes, your license moves to Cancelled, subscriber tokens are deactivated, and private feeds go dark — see Payment Failure and Recovery for the timeline and how recovery works
• Your episodes, shows, and settings are preserved in WordPress — nothing is deleted

Changed your mind? While your plan is set to end, the Change your plan panel offers Reactivate in place of Cancel. Reactivating before the end of the grace window keeps everything exactly as it is — your shows, your subscribers and your billing date are unchanged. Cancel and Reactivate are never both offered at once.

If you resubscribe after the grace window has closed, reconnect your site from the Account panel in your WordPress admin. Your content remains intact.

Refunds

Benecaster offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on initial paid plan purchases, no questions asked. Contact support at support@benecaster.com within 30 days of your purchase for a full refund. Subscription renewals are not refundable. If you have a billing issue or were charged in error, contact support — we can look at any payment, whenever it was made.

What happens to your account when a refund goes through

A refund is not the same as a cancellation, and the effect depends on which payment was refunded.

Most refunds change nothing. Only a full refund of the payment for the period you are in now suspends your license.

A suspension from a refund does not run out or close your account on its own. There is no countdown and nothing further is charged; your license stays suspended until we sort it out with you. If the refund itself fails (your bank sends it back), the suspension is lifted and we email you to say your license is active again.

Your data is safe. Your subscriber list, episode library and settings stay in your WordPress database. Nothing is deleted from your site, and if you subscribe again later your existing data works with the new license.

Ask us before you request a refund if the timing matters to you. If your subscribers would be affected by an immediate suspension, say so — cancelling instead keeps your feeds running to the end of the period you’ve paid for.

Chargebacks

If you dispute a charge with your bank rather than contacting us, your license is suspended while the dispute runs. We don’t email you when a dispute opens, so you won’t hear from us automatically; contact support to sort it out.

If the bank decides the charge stands, your suspension is lifted automatically. If the bank returns the money to you, the suspension stays, because that period is no longer paid for. Like a refund suspension, it does not end on its own.

Talk to us first. A refund request by email is faster than a dispute, gets the same money back, and doesn’t put your account into a state neither of us wants.

Lifetime Licenses

Benecaster does not offer lifetime licenses.