What Happens When a Subscriber Cancels
When a subscriber cancels their membership, Benecaster receives the cancellation event from your membership plugin and marks their token as revoked. What happens next depends on a per-show setting — by default, the cancellation is invisible to the subscriber’s podcast app.
Default: Silent Downgrade to Public Feed
When a subscriber’s membership cancels, their private feed URL stays alive and their podcast app keeps polling it. Instead of their tier-specific private feed, Benecaster now serves your show’s public feed at that URL.
From the subscriber’s perspective:
- Their app does not show an error — the URL resolves normally
- New private episodes no longer appear in their feed
- Public episodes continue to appear as normal
This is the default because most cancellations are voluntary — the subscriber chose to leave, and a sudden error in their app is surprising and creates support overhead. The silent downgrade lets them hear public content without a disrupting broken-feed experience.
Strict Mode: Return 403 on Revoked Tokens
If your membership agreement requires a hard cutoff, go to Show Settings → Settings → Feeds → Cancelled subscriber feeds and turn the toggle off. With the toggle off, any request with a revoked or unrecognized token returns an HTTP 403 error. Most podcast apps surface this as a “feed unavailable” state or stop fetching updates.
Use strict mode when:
- Your content licensing terms prohibit any post-cancellation access
- You are managing a paid event or cohort with a strict end date
- You have compliance requirements around private-content access windows
Cancelled Subscribers in the Feed Request Log
Even after cancellation, a subscriber’s app typically keeps polling your feed on its regular schedule (every few hours for most apps). These polls are logged in benecaster_feed_request_log with token_status: revoked.
A sustained pattern of revoked polls from the same token means the subscriber has not manually removed the feed from their app. That is a re-engagement signal — they may be willing to resubscribe if you reach out or run a promotion.
The Analytics Dashboard (add-on) can break this data down by show and date. See Feed Request Log Retention → for storage and retention information.
Built-in Membership: Cancellation Confirmation Email
(Built-in Membership only)
When a subscriber cancels through Benecaster’s built-in billing portal, they receive an immediate cancellation confirmation email at the moment the request is submitted — before the billing period ends and before their access is removed.
The email confirms that the cancellation was received, states the exact date their access ends, and includes a link to resume their subscription if they change their mind.
This is separate from the Subscription Cancelled email, which fires later at terminal cancellation — when the billing period actually ends, or when all Stripe payment retries are exhausted. Subscribers on built-in membership may receive both: the confirmation when they request cancellation, and the terminal email when their period ends.
Both emails have independent on/off toggles at Show → Settings → Subscription → Subscriber Billing Emails.
If a Subscriber Resubscribes
When a cancelled subscriber rejoins your membership, Benecaster restores their original feed URL — no new URL is issued. The existing token is reactivated in place, so their podcast app picks up private content automatically on its next scheduled poll.
This means:
- The subscriber does not need to re-add the feed to their app
- Episodes that became available after they resubscribed appear normally
- There is no gap in feed delivery caused by a URL change
This applies to both the default (silent downgrade) mode and strict mode. Under strict mode, resubscription flips the token back to active, lifting the 403 response immediately.
The exception: access you removed deliberately
A revoke you performed by hand is permanent, and a later resubscription does not undo it. This is the one case where rejoining does not restore the old feed URL.
The distinction is between access that lapsed and access you removed:
| How it was revoked | Does resubscribing restore it? |
|---|---|
| Subscriber cancelled, stopped paying, or a grace period expired | Yes — the original URL comes back automatically |
| You used Remove or Revoke Access in Benecaster → Subscribers | No — it stays revoked |
That is deliberate. Before this, a subscriber whose access you had deliberately removed could restore it themselves simply by resubscribing in your membership plugin — your decision was silently undone by a billing event, and nothing told you.
⚠ Use Remove / Revoke Access, not Reset, when you need to permanently sever access — for example a compromised or shared feed URL. Reset rotates the URL but leaves the subscriber active.
You are told when a resubscription is refused
When somebody with a deliberately revoked token resubscribes, a warning notice appears in your Benecaster admin with a link to the subscribers screen. You are not left to discover it.
This matters because they are paying and receiving nothing. Their membership is active and billing, and their feed is not being served. Act on the notice — the longer it sits, the likelier it ends as a refund request or a chargeback rather than a support question.
Granting access back
Use Reset Token on the subscriber’s detail panel. That is the single path back: it un-revokes the record and issues a fresh feed URL in one step.
Re-running the membership signup will not work — it hits the same guard and produces the same notice again.
⚠ Reset issues a NEW feed URL, so this subscriber does need to re-add it to their podcast app. That is unavoidable here: the old URL was deliberately severed, and reinstating it would defeat the point of having severed it.
How Cancellation Is Detected
Benecaster relies on your membership plugin to fire a cancellation or expiry event. Supported bridges fire this event promptly when a membership cancels. If a subscriber’s access lapses in your membership plugin but the plugin has not yet fired the event, Benecaster may continue serving their private feed for a short window — this is typically measured in seconds or minutes for active memberships.
If you suspect a bridge is not firing cancellation events correctly, check Connect Your Membership Plugin → for bridge-specific notes.
See Also
- What Happens When a Token Is Revoked → — the per-show toggle and feed-log implications in detail
- Revoking Access → — how to manually revoke a subscriber’s access from the admin panel
- How Feed Tokens Work → — token lifecycle and dispatch logic