Promote to Bridge — Moving Subscribers to an External Membership Plugin

Promote to Bridge is a one-time migration tool that lets you move subscribers from Benecaster’s built-in membership system into an external subscription plugin — such as MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, or Paid Memberships Pro — while keeping their feed access uninterrupted during the handoff.

You would use this when you have outgrown the built-in membership system and want to adopt a full-featured membership plugin, or when you are consolidating an existing membership plugin with a second audience that started on built-in membership.

Before You Start

Payment must be handled outside Benecaster. The Promote to Bridge wizard creates subscriber accounts in the target membership plugin — it does not move payment details or Stripe subscriptions. You are responsible for collecting payment in the destination plugin (or billing subscribers separately) and cancelling their Stripe subscriptions in the built-in membership system after the migration.

The wizard is a one-way operation. There is no built-in rollback.

Running the Wizard

The wizard is at Settings → Subscription → Promote to Bridge (the promote button in the subscription settings tab). It runs in five steps:

Select destination bridge — choose the external membership plugin you are moving to. Only bridges that implement the writable interface are listed (bridges that can create members programmatically).
Map tiers — for each of your native tiers, choose the corresponding level in the destination plugin.
Set grace period — choose how many days subscribers have before their existing feed token expires. During the grace period, subscribers can still use their old token while they complete setup in the new system.
Confirm — review the subscriber counts per tier and confirm the run.
Done — results summary showing how many were promoted, skipped, and errored.

What Happens During Promotion

For each active subscriber:

Benecaster calls the destination bridge to create a member account for that subscriber.
A grace-period expiry date is written to the subscriber’s record.
The subscriber’s existing feed token continues to work through the grace period.
When the grace period ends, the feed token is revoked.

Subscribers who already exist in the destination plugin (matched by email) are skipped.

Grace Period

The grace period gives subscribers time to connect their new membership account to their podcast app. During this window:

Their existing Benecaster feed token works as normal
They receive a reminder email 6–8 days before the grace period ends
They receive an expiry email when the token is revoked

After revocation, subscribers who have been successfully onboarded in the destination plugin will have a new feed URL provided by the bridge. Subscribers who have not completed setup will need to contact you for assistance.

For more detail on how the grace period is managed and monitored, see Promote to Bridge — Grace Period.

Re-authorisation

In V1, re-authorisation after the grace period is manual-only. If a subscriber completes setup in the destination plugin after their grace period expires, you can restore their access from Settings → Subscription → Promotion History — find their row and click Clear grace. This resets the expiry marker and re-enables their token.

Automatic detection of when a subscriber completes setup in the destination plugin is planned for a future release.

Promotion History

The Promotion History panel (below the wizard entry point) shows every subscriber who has been through a promotion, their grace period status, and their target bridge. You can extend or clear grace periods for individual subscribers from this panel.

For Developers

[benecaster_bridge_promote_complete](/docs/benecaster_bridge_promote_complete/) — fires when the promotion run finishes
[benecaster_promote_grace_expired](/docs/benecaster_bridge_promote_complete/) — fires when an individual subscriber’s grace period expires
PromotionService — the class that drives the promotion run and grace period management
BridgeWritable — the interface a bridge must implement to appear in the wizard’s destination list
REST API endpoints: Promote to Bridge REST API