Subscription Billing Cadence

A tier can be sold at more than one billing cadence. Monthly and yearly is the familiar pair, but a tier can carry any set you like — quarterly, six-monthly, weekly, a one-off “founding rate” at a longer interval. You build the list on the tier itself, in the Prices repeater; see Built-in Membership → Prices. This page covers what your listeners actually see once you have.

How the Subscription Page Renders Cadences

The subscription page is drawn by the [benecaster_subscribe] shortcode. Each tier gets a card, and each card carries its own cadence selector — there is no single site-wide monthly/yearly switch.

That matters when your tiers are not symmetric. A show can sell Gold monthly-and-yearly while Founding Member is yearly-only, and each card presents exactly the choice that tier offers. Nothing is greyed out and no card advertises a cadence it cannot sell.

Two or more cadences on a tier — the card shows a radio group, one option per cadence, labelled with the wording you entered and the price. The cadence you marked as Default is pre-selected. The button underneath re-reads as the subscriber changes the selection.

One cadence on a tier — no selector appears. The price is shown inline on the card, and the button goes straight to checkout. There is nothing to choose, so nothing is asked.

No cadences on a tier — the card is not rendered. The tier is invisible to subscribers until it has at least one price. See A tier with no prices is hidden.

The Button Label

The subscribe button restates the choice rather than saying “Subscribe” and leaving the subscriber to trust the radio button they clicked:

Subscribe monthly — $8.00

The pattern is Subscribe {your cadence label} — {amount}. Because the cadence half of that comes from the label you typed into the Prices repeater, the wording is yours: “Subscribe yearly — $80.00”, “Subscribe every 3 months — $22.00”, “Subscribe founding rate — $250.00”.

Keep labels short. They appear twice — once beside the radio button and once inside the button — and long ones wrap badly on narrow cards.

Choosing Which Cadence Is Default

The default is the one most subscribers will take, not necessarily the cheapest. Two ways to think about it:

• Default to monthly if your priority is the lowest possible barrier to signing up. More people start; more of them churn in the first three months.
• Default to annual if your priority is cash up front and lower churn. Fewer people start, and the ones who do are worth substantially more.

Whichever you pick, price the longer cadence below the monthly equivalent and Benecaster will show the saving on the card automatically — you do not need to write “save 17%” into the label yourself.

What Happens After They Subscribe

The cadence is fixed at checkout and drives everything downstream: when Stripe charges, when the renewal reminder goes out, and what the subscriber’s account page reports as their next renewal date.

Subscribers cannot switch cadence themselves from the account page. To move someone from monthly to annual, cancel the existing subscription and have them re-subscribe at the cadence they want — their feed URL survives, since tokens are not tied to billing. See How Billing Scenarios Work.

Changing Cadences Later

Adding a cadence is safe at any time. It appears on the card immediately for new subscribers, and changes nothing for anyone already subscribed.

Removing a cadence withdraws it from sale. Existing subscribers on that cadence keep renewing at their rate indefinitely — withdrawing a price never cancels anyone. If you want them moved, you have to cancel and re-enroll them deliberately.

Changing an amount applies to new sign-ups only. Existing subscribers stay on the rate they signed up at, because Stripe prices are immutable once created and Benecaster mints a new one rather than editing the old.

For Developers

The rendered markup changed with the N-price model. Each tier card now carries a single data-prices attribute holding a JSON array of that tier’s cadences, replacing the older data-monthly-price and data-annual-price attribute pair. Anything reading those two attributes needs updating — see the benecaster_subscribe shortcode reference.

POST /shows/{id}/subscribe now takes a price_id identifying the chosen cadence. The older billing_interval parameter is still accepted so existing clients keep working, and resolves to the tier’s month × 1 or year × 1 price.

To add a cadence to a tier programmatically — setup scripts, WP-CLI, multi-site provisioning — see the recipe Add a Quarterly Cadence to an Existing Tier.