License Status and Plan

Your license drives everything in Benecaster’s paid tier — subscriber tokens, private feeds, membership plugin bridges, and the notification system. This page covers what the status indicators mean, how to read the Account tab, and what happens when something needs attention.

The Account Tab

Go to Benecaster → Settings → Account to see your full license state at a glance.

Shows hides the upgrade link on Studio, which has no show limit.

Connecting an additional site beyond your plan’s activation limit is refused, so if a second install won’t connect, this is usually why rather than a fault. See Show Limits and Multi-Site Use →.

Subscriber Usage Bar

The usage bar fills as your paying subscriber count approaches your plan limit. At 80% it turns amber and shows an upgrade prompt. At 100% it turns blue — on Launch the message reads “You’ll automatically move to Starter at your next billing period”; on paid plans it reads “Upgrade to [next plan] to keep growing →”.

Listeners who only hold episodes they bought (no active membership) are not counted in it. On a show that uses built-in membership, members of a paid tier count exactly as members do on a bridge plugin, and free-tier members and followers do not.

The usage bar is hidden on Pro, Multi-Show, and Studio — those plans have no paying subscriber limit.

Status Values

Active

Your license is valid, validated within the last 24 hours, and all premium features are running. No action needed.

Expiring Soon

Your subscription renews within the next 30 days and the renewal payment has not been taken yet. Nothing is wrong and there is nothing to do — this status simply means the renewal date is close. Subscriptions renew automatically; if the payment fails when it is attempted, Benecaster will tell you then.

Academic License Moving to the Free Launch Plan

If you have a free academic license that was not reverified, Benecaster shows a warning in your notices: “Your academic license was not reverified, so it moves to the free Launch plan on [date].” The date is 30 days after the lapse. It is a move to a free plan, not an expiry: your site keeps working after the move, within the Launch plan limits.

The notice says how to stay on your current plan: reverify using the link in the email we sent you, or choose a paid plan. Manage license opens your account page on benecaster.com.

• While it is showing, it replaces the usual “Your license expires in N days” notice, because your license’s renewal date is not the real deadline.
• You can dismiss it. It comes back after 7 days for as long as the license is still waiting to move.
• It shows a date and not a count of days, so it never goes out of date while dismissed.
• A paid academic license never sees it. If a paid academic license fails reverification, it only loses the academic discount and stays on its plan. See Academic Verification.

The Dashboard’s Needs attention section shows the same message. See Dashboard Overview.

Expired / Cancelled / Suspended

These three states share the same plugin behavior (see Grace Period Behavior below). They differ in why they occurred:

• Expired — the subscription lapsed (failed payment not recovered, or annual subscription not renewed)
• Cancelled — you cancelled the subscription at benecaster.com
• Suspended — a payment failed and was not resolved. Subscribers are unaffected for the first 30 days — their private feed URLs continue to deliver their tier-specific content normally. No notification is sent to them. After the 30-day window closes without recovery, subscriber tokens are deactivated and private feeds stop working entirely — they do not fall back to your public feed. Your public feed itself keeps working normally. Recovery via billing update at any point restores full private access on the next daily license validation. See Payment Failure and Recovery → for the full timeline and reminder cadence.

In all three cases, visit benecaster.com/my-account/ to resolve.

Unlicensed

This site is not connected to a Benecaster plan. The plugin runs as the WordPress.org free version — public feed only, no subscriber management.

Grace Period Behavior

The details differ by status, but all three inactive states share some behaviors:

New token generation stops in all three states. New subscribers who sign up through your membership plugin will not receive a feed URL until the license is restored.

All your data is preserved in all three states. Subscriber tokens, episodes, show settings, and tier mappings are completely untouched. Nothing is deleted.

A persistent non-dismissible banner appears across all Benecaster admin screens explaining the license is inactive, with a link to your account to resolve it.

Plugin updates keep working during the grace period. While a license is in grace — cancelled and running out the term you have paid for, or suspended after a failed payment — Benecaster and your add-ons carry on receiving updates, security releases included. You do not have to resolve billing before you can update. Once the grace period ends and the license reaches expired or cancelled, updates stop.

Your public feed keeps working throughout, and after. This is the part worth being clear about, because “private feeds stop working” reads worse than it is. When a license lapses, the site falls back to exactly the free WordPress.org version of Benecaster — your episodes, your public RSS feed, your listener support links, all running normally. What stops is the paid part: the token-specific feed URLs that deliver subscriber-only content.

You lose subscriber delivery. You do not lose your podcast, your episodes, or your public audience.

And it is a state, not a conversion — renewing puts everything back. Nothing is downgraded, deleted, or migrated. Your subscriber records, tokens, tier mappings, episodes and settings all stay exactly where they are; the tokens are switched off, not destroyed. Renew or reactivate and the next validation check turns them back on, on the same feed URLs your subscribers already have.

This works whether you resolve it on day 5 or day 45. There is no point after which recovery stops being possible — a license that lapsed months ago restores in full the moment it is brought current. Your subscribers do not need to do anything, and you do not need to reissue tokens or resend welcome emails.

The one exception is a subscriber whose podcast app gave up and removed the show during the cutoff. Their URL works again, but the app no longer holds it, so they will need to re-add it. After a long cutoff, tell your subscribers rather than waiting for them to notice.

Suspended (payment failed)

Private subscriber feeds continue working normally for 30 days from the first payment-failed response. Subscribers receive no notification and see no change. After 30 days without recovery, subscriber access is blocked — tokens stop delivering content entirely until the license is restored. Your public feed carries on unaffected.

On this path — and only this one — Benecaster stops your subscribers’ billing for you. When a failed payment runs the full 30 days, collection on every built-in-membership subscription Benecaster created is stopped automatically, so nobody carries on paying for a feed that has gone quiet. Two cases are skipped and you are told which; billing you run through an external membership plugin is never touched. Paused is not cancelled — closing those subscriptions is still your decision.

See Payment Failure and Recovery → for the full timeline, the reminder email cadence, and recovery steps. That page owns this behaviour in full: the two skipped cases, what recovery restores, and why it works this way here and nowhere else.

Expired / Cancelled

When a license expires or is cancelled, Benecaster gives existing subscribers access until the end of the current billing period. After that, their tokens are deactivated and private feeds stop working — they do not fall back to your public feed. Your public feed itself is untouched and keeps publishing.

The audio stops with the feed. It is not only that no new episodes arrive: the tokenized audio links inside episodes their app is already showing stop working too, so tapping play on an episode listed weeks ago fails as well. Episodes they already downloaded stay on their device — a file on disk is untouched. What stops is fetching anything new.

Followers are the exception and keep both their feed and their downloads, because a follower’s feed only ever carried your public episodes.

Subscribers will notice: their podcast app reports an error or an empty feed rather than quietly showing fewer episodes. That is deliberate. Someone whose paid access has ended should be told, not moved onto the free tier without knowing it.

** Stop your subscribers’ billing yourself — on this path, Benecaster will not do it for you.** This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong when winding a show down, and it is yours to do whenever private feeds stop because a license was cancelled or allowed to expire.

A failed payment is the one exception, and it is handled for you — see Suspended (payment failed) above. Do not read that as cover for a deliberate cancellation: cancelling never opens a payment-failure window, so nothing is ever stopped on your behalf here.

Your subscribers keep being charged. Whatever takes their money has no idea your license lapsed and will bill on its own schedule indefinitely. They would be paying full price for a feed that has stopped working — and the first you hear of it is likely to be a refund request, or a chargeback.

Do this before you cancel, not after:

• External membership plugin (Restrict Content Pro, Paid Memberships Pro, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Patreon, and the rest) — cancel or pause the subscriptions there. Benecaster cannot reach into another plugin’s billing, and there is no setting that changes that.
• Built-in membership — cancel or pause them in Benecaster → Memberships. On this path that is still a manual step: cancelling or letting your license expire stops subscriber feeds, but it does not stop subscriber payments.

Do it in this order: stop the billing first, then cancel your Benecaster license. The reverse leaves a window where subscribers are paying for feeds that have already gone dark.

Restoring full access: Renew or reactivate your license at benecaster.com/my-account/. The next validation check (automatic or triggered manually from Settings → Account) restores private feed delivery and new token generation with no other steps required.

Validation Failure — When the Server Can’t Be Reached

Benecaster runs a validation check once daily via WordPress’s built-in cron. If the license server is unreachable — a network outage, a firewall rule, or a problem on our side — Benecaster keeps operating normally rather than assuming the worst. This is the fail-open design: a connectivity issue is not a license issue, and a temporary outage should never cost you your subscribers.

Fail-open has a limit, though, and it is 30 days. See below for what happens at each stage. On low-traffic sites the daily check can run several hours late — see Cron isn’t firing on time → if validations feel delayed.

Days 1–7: The failure is logged locally but nothing changes. Private feeds continue serving tier content as normal.

Day 8 onward: A warning appears in your Benecaster admin telling you how many days the license server has been unreachable and that features will be restricted after 30 days. You can dismiss it, but it comes back every 7 days while the problem persists.

This warning is the one to act on. It almost always means something on your side is blocking outbound HTTPS — a firewall rule, a security plugin, a host-level egress restriction, or a DNS problem. Benecaster cannot fix it from here.

Days 15–29: From day 15 each daily check also has a chance of alerting the Benecaster team, so a sustained outage usually reaches us within a few days of that point. We may reach out to help you diagnose it.

Day 30: If validation has not succeeded in 30 consecutive days, premium features are restricted, new token generation stops, and private feeds stop working. Subscribers do not fall back to your public feed. The site drops to the free WordPress.org version of Benecaster — your public feed and episodes keep running as normal.

Thirty days is a deliberate limit rather than a technical one. Benecaster cannot tell the difference between a site that genuinely cannot reach us and a site that has been configured not to — so an indefinite grace period would simply be a way to run a paid plan without paying for it. A month of full service on an unverified license is generous; unlimited is not something we can offer.

In practice this should never reach you by surprise. You will have had the admin warning since day 8, repeating weekly, naming the 30-day consequence. Everything is restored by the next successful validation — no data is lost, no feed URL changes, and subscribers need do nothing.

Recovering: Once your site can reach the license server again, the next validation check clears all failure state and fully restores operation. Trigger it manually from Settings → Tools → License → Run license check now if you want immediate confirmation.

This is distinct from an explicit "invalid" response from the server, which takes effect immediately regardless of how many days have passed.

The Notification Center

The bell icon in the Benecaster top bar is your notification center. A badge appears when there are unread notices. Click to open the slide-in panel.

Notices fall into five severity tiers:

Dismiss individual notices with the ✕ on each card, or use ✓ Dismiss all to clear all dismissible notices at once. Critical notices have no dismiss button — they stay until the condition resolves.

Persistent Banners

Critical notices also appear as a full-width red banner between the Benecaster top bar and the page content, visible on every Benecaster screen. A banner with no close button cannot be dismissed — the condition itself must be resolved first.

Specific Warnings

Suspicious Subscriber Count Drop

If the license server detects an unusually large drop in your subscriber count, it emails you — this is not shown as a notice in your WordPress admin.

Common causes: a bulk membership cancellation batch, a bridge misconfiguration that temporarily reported zero active memberships, or running a large data cleanup. Contact support if you’re not sure what triggered it.

Downgrade Not Yet Eligible

Moving down a plan requires your license to have fitted inside the smaller plan for 30 continuous days on every limit it sets. For Launch, that means all three of its limits — 10 or fewer paying subscribers, one active show, and 250 or fewer total listeners including free-tier ones. The clock resets if any one stops fitting.

This is decided at benecaster.com, not in your WordPress admin. Until you qualify, My Account → Change plan has no downgrade option at all; once you do, a Switch to a smaller plan section appears and we email you. Nothing in the plugin locks or delays a plan change, and an upgrade does not freeze your plan for a billing period. Contact support if you believe you should already qualify.

Show Limit Reached

If you try to create a new show but have already reached your plan’s show limit, a persistent admin notice appears:

“Your show limit has been reached — you can’t create another show on this plan. Upgrade your plan at benecaster.com.”

If you are simply at your limit, your existing shows are unaffected — only the attempt to create a new one is blocked. Upgrade to Multi-Show or Studio for more shows at benecaster.com/my-account/.

Being over your show limit is a different situation, and it does affect existing shows. This happens when your limit falls below the number of shows you already have — most often after downgrading from Multi-Show to a single-show plan. Benecaster then disables the excess shows, newest first, and a disabled show is hidden from your site’s public pages.

The count is reconciled at each daily validation check, so this resolves itself as soon as you are back inside your limit — either by upgrading again, or by archiving shows until you fit. An archived show stops counting straight away, so you can add a show again at once; a disabled show comes back at the next license check, not the moment you archive. To run that check straight away, use Run license check now (see below). Nothing is deleted in either case.

See also: Show Limits and Multi-Site Use →

80% Upgrade Notices

Two independent notices appear as you approach your plan limits:

Paying subscriber notice: Appears when paying subscribers reach 80% of your subscriber limit. Shows your current count and limit with an upgrade link. Has a 30-day per-admin-user cooldown — dismissing it on one admin account doesn’t affect others. Reappears after 30 days if the condition persists.

Total token notice: Appears when the combined count of paying and free subscribers reaches 80% of your total token cap. This is separate from the subscriber notice — both can appear simultaneously and each is dismissible independently.

What the Enforcement Settings Do

Two settings under Settings → Account govern what happens when you go over a plan limit — one for the paying subscriber limit, one for the total token cap. Each can be set to Auto-upgrade or Cap.

Each limit follows its own setting. The paying subscriber limit defaults to Auto-upgrade and the token cap to Cap. For the token cap:

• Cap — over-cap free listeners are locked out until you upgrade; their feed URL returns an error rather than your public feed. Over-cap paying subscribers receive your public feed. A paying subscriber is never locked.
• Auto-upgrade — nobody is moved to the public feed. Your plan is raised instead once the count has been over the cap continuously for the license server’s window — see How Subscriber Limits Work for the current length.

The paying subscriber limit is not conditional in the same way. Subscribers past that limit receive the public feed under both settings, because raising a plan is not instant — the license server’s window has to run first, and your account is over its limit for the whole of it. The setting decides how the overage is finally resolved, not what happens in the meantime.

See How Subscriber Limits Work for the full comparison and the defaults.

Checking License Status Manually

To trigger an immediate validation check, go to Settings → Tools → License and click Run license check now. Use this after renewing an expired license, fixing a connectivity issue, or archiving shows to get back inside your show limit. The result shows the current status, plan and last validation time.