What is a follower versus a free member?

Both are ways for listeners to follow your show without paying, and both can receive your broadcast emails. Both get a private, tokenized feed URL, and both occupy a slot in your plan’s total token cap while occupying none of your paying subscriber limit.

The difference that matters is what their feed carries. A follower’s feed carries your public feed’s episodes. A free member’s feed can carry whatever you gate to their tier, including material the public never sees.

A follower signs up through the [benecaster_follower_signup] shortcode. No membership plugin required, no payment of any kind, and no Benecaster account required on your end — it works on a plain WordPress.org install with no license at all, up to a cap of 100 followers. At the cap the form stops accepting new followers and shows you a prompt; existing followers are unaffected.

A follower list is about reach and about owning the relationship. You get their email address, you can email them, and you can see per-follower download numbers and revoke an individual token — none of which a public feed URL gives you. What you cannot do is give followers something the public feed does not have. There is no per-episode follower setting; publish to your public feed and every follower has it.

Use follower signup when you want the lowest possible friction for listeners to join your list — before you’ve set up subscription infrastructure, or alongside a paid tier as a “stay in touch” option.

A free member joins through your membership plugin at a free tier — a level you’ve configured with no payment required. Free members require a supported membership plugin (MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Paid Memberships Pro, or Restrict Content Pro) and an active Benecaster license. Their feed is governed by the same tier mapping as any paid tier, so it can carry gated content.

Use free membership tiers when you want to offer structured gated content at no cost, and you already have membership infrastructure in place. Use followers when you want a list.

Both followers and free-tier members count toward your plan’s total token cap but not toward your paying subscriber limit. See Do followers count against my token cap? →

Developers can customize the [benecaster_follower_signup] form using the benecaster_follower_signup_output filter, which fires for every render state (form, success, error) — see the hook reference for details. The free member signup flow goes through your membership plugin directly, so customization there uses that plugin’s own hooks.