Do I need to cancel Castos before switching to Benecaster?

No — and you shouldn’t, at least not immediately.

Run both during your migration’s grace period. Your subscribers receive their new Benecaster feed URL in the migration welcome email; as they switch to it, you can watch completion rates in the Migration Dashboard. Cancel Castos when migration completion has plateaued — typically after the grace period ends and you’ve re-sent to non-completers.

Some podcasters prefer a slower transition: keep Castos running, let new subscribers come in through Benecaster, and let existing subscribers migrate on their own timeline without a hard cutoff. This works, but it comes with tradeoffs — your subscriber list is split across two platforms, and your analytics are too. You won’t get a unified view of engagement or churn until everyone is on Benecaster.

If unified analytics matter to you before you’ve fully cancelled Castos, you can import your Castos subscriber CSV into Benecaster using the same process as a Patreon migration — the Migration Wizard supports it. This lets Benecaster build a historical picture of your subscriber base even if those subscribers are still technically active on Castos. See Can Benecaster import my Castos subscriber list? for details.