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Configuring Member Limits in Your Membership Plugin

Why This Matters

Benecaster enforces your plan’s subscriber limit by flagging over-limit subscribers at the feed. What that flag does depends on whether the member is paying:

  • A paying member is demoted. Their RSS URL continues to work — they just receive your public episodes, not the private tier they paid for.
  • A free-tier member’s feed is locked. Their RSS URL stops returning episodes altogether. This applies to members on any level you have mapped as a free tier, exactly as it does to a follower, and only when your token cap enforcement is set to Cap rather than automatic upgrades.

A paying member is never locked, as long as you — the podcaster — have an active Benecaster subscription.

Benecaster never blocks a signup — on any plan, with any membership system. Enforcement happens on the feed side only. This is the same on Built-in Membership as on a third-party plugin, and the same on Launch as on any paid plan.

If you use a third-party membership plugin (MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro), Benecaster does not stop that plugin from billing new subscribers after your limit is reached. When a new subscriber signs up through your membership plugin after you’ve reached your Benecaster plan limit, their membership charges them normally, but they receive your public feed instead of their private feed until you upgrade. This is not a limitation of third-party plugins. Built-in Membership does the same thing, deliberately — see Built-in Membership below.

To prevent this, configure your membership plugin to stop accepting new signups when you reach your Benecaster limit. Each supported plugin handles this differently.

Note: Each membership plugin is its own independent product with its own features and support team. Benecaster cannot control how a third-party plugin handles subscriber limits, and we’re not able to provide support for your membership plugin’s settings. Contact that plugin’s support team if you need help configuring limit behavior.

Built-in Membership

If you’re using Benecaster’s Built-in Membership (Benecaster → Settings → Membership), the checkout form is never closed and signups are never blocked. Reaching your plan limit changes nothing about what a new subscriber sees: your tier cards render as normal, checkout completes, and their payment goes through.

What changes is what their feed serves. Their token is flagged over-limit and delivers your public episodes rather than the private tier they paid for — the same treatment any over-limit token gets, on any plan.

This means Built-in Membership needs the same attention as a third-party plugin, not less. It is easy to assume Benecaster protects you here because it owns the checkout. It does not. A subscriber who signs up over your limit is charged in full and receives public episodes, and the safeguard is you noticing the amber warning in your admin and upgrading — not the checkout refusing them.

If you want signups to stop at your limit, that is a decision to make deliberately: pause or unpublish the tier in Benecaster → Memberships until you upgrade.

Benecaster does not make that decision for you, and the reasoning is that a signup form refusing money is the worse outcome. A subscriber over your limit is one upgrade away from getting exactly what they paid for; a subscriber who was turned away is gone.

MemberPress

MemberPress supports native member limits per membership level. When the limit is reached, the registration page shows an enrollment-closed message and stops accepting new signups.

To set a member limit on a MemberPress membership:

  1. In your WordPress admin, go to MemberPress → Memberships and open the membership level.
  2. Click the Advanced tab.
  3. Find the Membership Limit field and enter the maximum number of members you want to allow.
  4. Save the membership.

Align this number with your Benecaster plan’s paying subscriber limit. If you’re on Starter (up to 50 paying subscribers) and have one membership level, set that level’s limit to 50. If you have multiple levels that each grant private feed access, split the limit across them to keep your total within the Benecaster plan cap.

When the limit is reached: MemberPress closes enrollment for that level automatically. New visitors see a sold-out message. Existing subscribers are unaffected.

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions does not have a native per-product subscriber cap. New subscription signups are accepted regardless of how many active subscribers exist.

Workarounds:

Option 1 — Manually close the product. Check your current count in Benecaster → Subscribers. At 80% of your limit, Benecaster shows an upgrade prompt in your admin. When you’re near your cap, set the WooCommerce subscription product to Out of stock or switch its status to Draft to stop new purchases until you upgrade.

Option 2 — Upgrade before you hit the limit. The most straightforward path: upgrade your Benecaster plan before new signups push you over. See Upgrading Your Plan.

Paid Memberships Pro does not include member limits in the Benecaster plugin. Limit functionality is available through the Member Limit add-on, available free from the PMPro add-on library.

To add member limits:

  1. Install and activate the PMPro Member Limit add-on.
  2. In your WordPress admin, go to Memberships → Membership Levels and edit the level you want to cap.
  3. The add-on adds a Member Limit field to the level editor. Enter your limit.
  4. Save the level.

When the limit is reached, PMPro closes enrollment and displays a message you can configure. New signups for that level are blocked until a spot opens or you raise the limit.

Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro does not have a native member limit feature. New signups are accepted without a cap.

Workarounds:

Option 1 — Manually close enrollment. Monitor your count in Benecaster → Subscribers and watch for the 80% warning in your admin. When you’re approaching your limit, edit the subscription level in RCP and set it to inactive to stop new signups.

Option 2 — Custom code. A developer can use RCP’s rcp_can_subscribe filter to block new signups conditionally. The filter receives the membership level ID and should return true to allow or false to block. Hook into it to compare the current subscriber count against your Benecaster plan limit and return false when the limit is reached.

Option 3 — Upgrade before you hit the limit. See Upgrading Your Plan.

What Happens When a Subscriber Is Over-limit

When you exceed your Benecaster plan limit, over-limit subscribers’ tokens are flagged. The flag has two different outcomes, and which one a member gets depends on whether their mapped level is a paid tier or a free one.

Paying members are demoted. They receive your public episode feed rather than their private subscriber feed. Their RSS URL continues to work — their podcast app receives episodes, just not the private ones their tier includes.

Free-tier members are locked. If you have mapped a $0 or free membership level to a Benecaster tier, those members count against the same token cap as everyone else, and when they are the ones flagged their feed URL returns an error instead of a feed. Their podcast app reports the feed as gone or unavailable and they receive no episodes at all. Their membership in your plugin is untouched — nothing is cancelled and no URL changes.

This only happens when your token cap enforcement is set to Cap. Under automatic upgrades, no member is ever locked. See Upgrading Your Plan for the difference between the two settings.

Over-limit members are highlighted in Benecaster → Subscribers, with an indicator naming which of the two outcomes applies — How Subscriber Limits Work explains both.

If a member reports a dead feed, check that screen before looking anywhere else. It distinguishes a locked member from a demoted one, which is the fastest confirmation that the cap — not your membership plugin — is the cause.

Upgrading your plan clears the over-limit flag automatically at the next validation check. Private feed access is restored with no RSS URL change and no action required from your subscriber.

See How Feed Tokens Work and Upgrading Your Plan.

See Also

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