Running a Subscription-Only Show

A subscription-only show is one where every episode sits behind a paid tier and the public feed carries nothing — or nothing but a trailer. Benecaster supports this, and there is no setting to switch on: it is simply what happens when you publish nothing to the public tier.

This page covers how to set one up and the three consequences worth knowing before you do.

How to Set It Up

You do not remove or disable anything. There is no public feed to delete and no switch to turn off — your public feed URL keeps existing and keeps working exactly as it always did. The only difference is that nothing is in it.

Your public feed is a tier like any other. Episodes appear in it because you granted them to it, so a public feed with no episodes is simply the result of never granting one.

Create your show and tiers as normal. Nothing about this setup changes how tiers work.
When publishing an episode, do not grant it to the public tier. Grant it only to the paid tiers that should receive it.
Check the public feed. Open your public feed URL. You should see a valid feed with no episodes in it. That is the finished state, not an error — an empty feed is still a working feed.

Whether you still link to it is a separate decision, and it is yours. The feed stays reachable at its URL either way. If you would rather not advertise a feed with nothing in it, leave the RSS link and platform badges off your show page — that is a presentation choice, not part of the setup, and it changes nothing about how Benecaster serves the feed.

Existing episodes already public stay public — removing an episode from the public tier stops it appearing in future polls, but anyone who already downloaded it keeps their copy. There is no way to un-distribute an episode that has already gone out.

A trailer-only public feed is usually the better version of this. Publish one short episode — a trailer, or an explainer about how to subscribe — to the public tier and nothing else. It costs you nothing, and it solves most of the problems below.

What You Give Up

You cannot list in podcast directories

Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the rest require a feed with at least one episode to accept a submission. A completely empty public feed cannot be submitted, and a show that is not in the directories cannot be found by anyone browsing them.

This is the main reason to publish a trailer. One public episode makes the feed submittable, and your show becomes discoverable, while every real episode stays behind the paywall. See Submitting Your Podcast to Directories.

There is no soft landing for cancelled subscribers

When a subscriber cancels, Benecaster’s default is to keep their feed URL working and quietly serve them your public feed instead — the show stays in their podcast app, and they keep seeing new public episodes. It is an off-ramp rather than a door slamming.

With an empty public feed there is nothing to land on. Their app keeps polling a feed that never has anything in it, and most apps eventually stop asking. The practical effect is closer to strict mode, without your having chosen strict mode.

A billing lapse takes your whole show offline

If your own Benecaster payment fails and goes unresolved for 30 days, private feeds stop serving. A show with a substantial public catalogue keeps running in public while you sort it out. A subscription-only show has nothing left running at all.

Nothing is lost or deleted, and everything returns when billing is resolved — but the outage is total rather than partial. See Feed Behavior Following Payment Failure, and treat the day 0, 10, 20 and 29 reminder emails as the warnings they are meant to be.

Is It the Right Choice?

It suits a show whose entire proposition is that it is private — an internal or member-only briefing, a paid course, a corporate feed. For those, an empty public feed is the point.

For a show that is trying to grow an audience, a fully private feed removes both discovery routes at once: nobody can find you by browsing, and nobody can sample you before paying. The trailer-only version keeps the paywall exactly where it is and gives up neither.