Free Follower Tier
The follower tier lets listeners follow your podcast without a paid or free-tier membership through your subscription plugin. A follower gets access to your public RSS feed — they do not receive a private subscriber feed URL, and they do not consume a paid subscriber slot.
The Follower Signup Shortcode
Place [benecaster_follower_signup] on any page to render a sign-up form for free followers:
[benecaster_follower_signup show_id="3"]
| Attribute | Required | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
show_id |
Yes | — | Post ID of the show the follower is signing up for |
button_label |
No | "Follow" |
Text for the submit button |
success_message |
No | "You're in! Check your email for your feed URL." |
Message shown after a successful signup |
show_name_field |
No | "1" |
Set to "0" to hide the name field and collect email only |
Form fields: Name (optional, controlled by show_name_field) and Email (always required).
Duplicate signup: If the submitted email address already has a follower token for that show, the form shows the success message silently — no error is displayed and no second welcome email is sent. This prevents email enumeration.
No payment step: Followers are created directly. No checkout, no billing, no bridge membership required.
Granting Follower Access to Episodes
Follower access is controlled per episode via the same availability date system used for paid tiers. In the episode editor, the Tier Availability panel shows a row for each of your bridge membership tiers — and a Followers row alongside them.
- Set a date on the Followers row to make the episode available in follower feeds from that date onward. Setting it to a past date grants immediate access.
- Leave the date blank to exclude the episode from follower feeds entirely. Followers who poll the feed receive only episodes where the date is set and has passed.
The slug stored in benecaster_availability for follower-accessible episodes is the show’s follower tier slug. The default is 'follower'; it can be overridden per-show via the benecaster_follower_tier_slug filter.
Follower access is independent of paid tier access. Setting a date on the Followers row does not affect what paying subscribers at any tier can see, and vice versa. An episode can be available to followers but not paying subscribers, available to both, or available only to specific paying tiers with the Followers row blank.
How Followers Differ from Subscribers
| Paid subscriber | Follower | |
|---|---|---|
token_type |
subscriber |
follower |
| Source | Bridge (MemberPress, WooCommerce, etc.) | Direct sign-up via shortcode |
| Private subscriber feed | Yes | No — public feed only |
| Counts toward paid subscriber limit | Yes | No |
| Has a tier mapping row | Yes | No |
Followers are stored in the same benecaster_tokens table as paying subscribers but are excluded from all capacity calculations and bridge lookups because they have no row in benecaster_tier_map.
Counting Paying Subscribers
Because followers share the benecaster_tokens table with paying subscribers, any query that counts tokens without filtering by token_type overcounts. The correct paying subscriber count requires two conditions:
token_type = 'subscriber'— excludes followersis_free_tier = 0on the joined tier map row — excludes bridge members on a $0-mapped tier (these carrytoken_type = 'subscriber'and are not excluded by the first condition alone)
See Count Paying Subscribers Correctly for the canonical query pattern.
Related
- How Feed Tokens Work — token lifecycle, reset, and access model
- Subscriber Dashboard — managing subscriber records
- Free vs. Paid Features — what each plan tier includes
