Feed Behavior During a Payment Grace Period
When a Benecaster subscription payment fails, the license enters a grace period. Feed behavior changes in two distinct stages depending on how long the billing issue goes unresolved.
Days 1–29: no subscriber impact
During the first 29 days of a grace period, private subscriber feeds keep working exactly as normal. Your subscribers’ podcast apps continue polling their private feed URLs and receiving their tier-specific episodes without any interruption or error.
This window exists to give you room to resolve a billing problem without your audience paying for it. Nothing is sent to your subscribers, and nothing in their apps changes. See Payment Failure and Recovery for what you see during this phase.
Day 30: private feeds stop, public feed continues
If the grace period reaches day 30 without a successful payment, Benecaster enters hard cutoff. From that point:
- Private subscriber feed URLs stop serving. They return an error rather than content.
- They do not fall back to your public feed. There is no redirect and no substitute content.
- Your public feed keeps working normally, along with your episodes, your show pages, and listener support links.
The site runs as exactly the free WordPress.org version of Benecaster — nothing less, nothing more. You lose subscriber delivery. You do not lose your podcast.
This is a state, not a conversion. Nothing is downgraded, deleted, or migrated. Subscriber records, tokens, tier mappings, episodes and settings are all untouched — the tokens are switched off, not destroyed. Resolve the billing issue and everything returns, on the same feed URLs, with no deadline on when you can do it.
What subscribers see
Their podcast app reports an error or an empty feed. Depending on the app, that surfaces as a refresh failure, a warning icon, or simply no new episodes appearing. Episodes they already downloaded stay on their device.
Apps that repeatedly fail to fetch a feed may eventually drop the subscription entirely. That is the consequence worth planning around — see recovery below.
Why it is not softer than this
We considered redirecting subscribers to the public feed, and decided against it.
A subscriber whose app quietly switches to public episodes has no idea anything is wrong. Neither, in practice, do you — which removes the one signal that prompts anybody to fix the billing problem. It also misrepresents your show to the people who were paying for it: they believe they are still receiving what they bought, and they are not.
The clarity we owe goes to you, not to your subscribers. The reminder emails at days 0, 10, 20 and 29, the notices in your Benecaster admin, and your benecaster.com account all say exactly what is happening and how to resolve it. Every one of those reaches the person who can act on it. Your subscribers cannot fix your billing, and involving them in it silently serves nobody.
Recovery
When you resolve the billing issue and the license is restored, private feeds resume on the next request. No cron delay and nothing for subscribers to do.
Existing tokens are un-revoked in the same license validation cycle that clears the hard cutoff. Feed URLs are unchanged, so most subscribers simply see new episodes appear again on their next poll.
There is no deadline. Day 5, day 45, or a year later — the outcome is the same, because nothing is purged when the cutoff bites. A license that lapsed long ago restores in full the moment it is brought current.
The one case that needs action: a subscriber whose app dropped the show during the cutoff has to re-add it. Their URL still works — the app just no longer holds it. After a cutoff that ran for any length of time, a proactive message to your subscribers is worth more than waiting for support requests.
A note on subscription-only shows
If your show has no meaningful public feed — a subscription-only show where the public feed is empty or sparse — a cutoff means there is effectively nothing being served. That is the correct outcome rather than a gap: the public feed is what the free plugin provides, and if you publish nothing publicly, there is nothing for the free plugin to publish.
It does mean a cutoff is more visible for you than for a show with a large public catalog. Resolve billing promptly, and use the day 0/10/20/29 reminders as the warning they are meant to be.
Frequently asked questions
Will my subscribers know something went wrong?
They will know their feed has stopped — their app will report a failure. They will not be told why, and Benecaster sends them nothing. If you want them to understand what happened, contact them directly.
Will subscribers lose access to old premium episodes?
Through their feed, yes, for as long as the cutoff lasts. Anything already downloaded to their device stays there. Everything returns when the license is restored.
Do I need to resend feed URLs after recovery?
No. Token URLs are unchanged and start working again on their own. The only subscribers who need to do anything are those whose app dropped the show during the cutoff — they re-add it from their account page.
Does my public feed go down too?
No. Your public feed is unaffected at every stage, during grace and after cutoff.