Migration Overview

The Migration Wizard add-on moves your paying supporters off Patreon, Supercast or any platform that gives you a CSV export, and onto your own Benecaster feed. Everyone you bring across gets a private feed straight away and a grace period to set up payment with you, and a dashboard shows you how the move is going.

For the platform-specific details, see Migrating from Patreon and Migrating from Supercast. For any other platform, see Preparing a CSV File for Import.

Where It Lives

Benecaster → Shows, open the show your supporters are moving to, then Settings → Migration. The wizard works on one show at a time, and the tab appears only on shows the add-on is switched on for. Once the show has run an import, the tab opens on the migration dashboard instead, with the wizard behind Start another import.

The Migration Wizard Tour starts by pointing at that tab, then walks you through the backup step or, on a show that has already migrated, the dashboard. Open it from the Tours catalog.

Before You Start: Your Audio

Benecaster does not host audio. Your new feeds point at your episode files wherever they already live. If those files are on the platform you are leaving, that platform decides how long the links keep working, and they can stop as soon as your subscribers start leaving, which is exactly what migrating asks them to do. Then every subscriber you bring across gets a feed that does not play. Move them first — see Moving Audio Files Off Patreon. The wizard’s Check my feed reads your current feed and tells you where your episodes are served from.

The Steps

The wizard asks one thing at a time, and nothing is written until the last step.

1. Back up — a copy of your Benecaster data (shows, tiers, subscribers and their feed links), with a link to download it. You can skip it only by confirming you already have a recent backup.
2. Where are you migrating from? — Patreon, Supercast, or somewhere else.
3. Upload your export — the wizard reads it and shows you what it found, without importing anyone.
4. Check the columns — it matches your file’s columns to email, tier, name and join date, and asks when it cannot tell.
5. Map your tiers — choose where each of your old tiers lands, and mark any that were free.
6. Checklist — Before we bring your subscribers over: your audio, your tiers, your feed’s domain.
7. Grace period and emails — how long people have, and whether Benecaster emails them. The wizard estimates when the last welcome email will go out, as a best case, and lets you choose a gentler sending pace — never a faster one.
8. Confirm — a last look at what will happen, including whether the import fits your plan’s subscriber limit. If it would not, nobody is imported.

After the people are across, the wizard offers to bring your back catalogue in too, as drafts — see Episode Import.

After the Import

• Everyone has access straight away, on the tier you mapped them to, with their own private feed link.
• The emails go out if you left the sequence on: a welcome with their feed link, then a reminder and a final warning for anyone who has not signed up. See Migration Email Sequence.
• The grace period runs. People who set up payment are done; people who do not lose private episodes at the deadline but keep the public ones, and get their original feed back if they sign up later. See Grace Periods Explained.
• The dashboard shows progress — imported, still to finish, signed up and lapsed — and lets you resend anyone’s welcome email.

Where People Finish the Move

Each person’s emails carry a link that finishes their move. Where it lands depends on how the show takes payments:

• Benecaster’s built-in membership — the show’s subscribe page, with the tier they used to pay for listed first.
• MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Paid Memberships Pro or Restrict Content Pro — that plugin’s own signup page for the level their old tier was mapped to. They arrive already signed in, so the plugin asks for no email or password, and their payment lands on the account their feed belongs to — which is what marks them as signed up. Unlike Benecaster’s own checkout, the page offers that one level rather than every tier. At the tier step the wizard suggests each paid tier’s signup page from the plugin’s settings and asks you to confirm or replace it; the page must be on this site, and a tier with no signup page falls back to the show’s page.
• No membership system chosen yet — the wizard warns you, because there is nowhere to pay. Turn on Benecaster’s built-in membership under Settings → Membership; you have the whole grace period to do it.

The link keeps working after the deadline as a way to restart: for thirty days it still signs them in, and after that they log in themselves.

Who Can Use It

The Migration Wizard is included with some plans and available as a one-time purchase on others; see Add-ons Overview.