Shows Portfolio — Over-Limit State

When your plan’s show limit is exceeded, the Shows portfolio page (Benecaster → Shows) surfaces the situation in three places at once so you can act without hunting through settings.

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The Over-Limit Banner

A red alert banner appears at the top of the Shows list whenever at least one of your shows has been automatically disabled because you are over your plan’s show limit.

The banner names your own numbers and the shows affected. On a Growth plan with four shows, it reads:

You have 4 shows on a plan that allows 1. The following shows have been disabled: The Tuesday Review, Off-Mic, Long Story Short. [Upgrade your plan] or archive a different show to restore them.

Each show title in the banner is a link — click it to go directly to that show’s settings so you can review what it was publishing before it was disabled. The Upgrade your plan link takes you to your Benecaster account page, where the change is made — plan changes reprice the subscription you already have rather than starting a second one.

The banner cannot be dismissed. It clears automatically once all disabled shows are either re-enabled (by reducing your active show count to within your plan limit) or you upgrade to a plan with more shows.

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The Disabled Badge on Each Show

Every show that has been disabled by the over-limit check carries a red-outlined Disabled — over plan limit badge with a ban icon, inline in its title row on the Shows list.

Hovering over the pill reveals a tooltip:

This show’s feed returns 410 until you upgrade your plan or archive a different show.

This tells you exactly what your subscribers and podcast directories are seeing.

What a 410 is. It is the web’s code for “this is gone” — the deliberate counterpart to the 404 you have seen when a page cannot be found. A 404 says “not here, maybe it moved”; a 410 says “this existed and has been withdrawn.” Podcast apps and directories treat it as final: they stop retrying, and some will eventually drop the show from their listings rather than keep showing an empty feed.

That sounds worse than it is. The 410 is a response, not a deletion — your episodes, subscribers and settings are all untouched, and the feed starts answering normally again the moment the show is re-enabled. Apps pick it back up on their next fetch.

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The Greyed-Out Add Show Button

When you are over your plan’s show limit, the Add show button is greyed out and unclickable. Hovering over it shows:

Upgrade your plan or archive a show to add a new one.

This is different from the at-capacity state on some plans, which routes you to an upgrade prompt. The over-limit state disables the button entirely rather than opening a modal — there is no path forward other than upgrading or archiving.

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Resolving an Over-Limit State

You have two options:

Upgrade your plan. A plan with a higher show limit will re-enable the disabled shows automatically on the next license validation. Multi-Show allows up to 3 shows; Studio is the only plan with no show limit. Compare plans at benecaster.com/shop/plans/, and make the change itself from My Account → Change your plan, where your existing subscription is repriced rather than a second one being started.

Archive a show. Archiving one of your currently active shows may bring you back within your plan limit, which will re-enable the disabled shows automatically. Go to the show’s settings page and choose Archive show. Only active shows count against your plan limit.

Archiving is not a quiet filing-away — it shuts the show down. The archived show’s feed returns 410 exactly as a disabled one does, so its subscribers stop receiving episodes, and it stops taking new subscriptions. Your episodes, subscriber list and feed tokens are all preserved and come back intact when you unarchive, but for as long as a show is archived it is off the air. Choose the show you can most afford to take down, not merely the one you think about least.

Disconnecting a show is not a third option, and it used to look like one. Your show count is the number of published, non-archived shows on the site — connection state does not enter into it, so disconnecting a show frees no slot at all. It also stops that show’s subscriber feeds immediately: their feed URLs return an error and the audio stops downloading, until you reconnect. Your public feed and follower feeds keep working. Disconnecting therefore costs you delivery and gains you nothing here — archive the show instead, which does free the slot.

Recovery happens on the next successful license validation after you reduce your active show count or upgrade. To trigger it immediately without waiting for the daily automatic check, go to Settings → Tools → License and click Run license check now.

See Show Limits and Multi-Site Use → for the full logic behind which shows are disabled when you go over limit, and how partial recovery works.