Why does Benecaster serve the public feed for over-limit subscribers rather than blocking access?

A broken RSS URL in a podcast app is invisible. The app stops refreshing silently — no error message, no notification. The subscriber doesn’t know what happened, and you’d need to track them down individually with a new URL. At any real subscriber count, that’s an operational headache and a churn risk.

By serving the public feed instead of blocking access entirely, over-limit subscribers still have a working feed in their app. When you upgrade your plan, every affected subscriber automatically gets their private feed restored — no URL change, no email to every subscriber, no action required from anyone.

The trade-off in cap mode (for paying subscribers using a third-party membership plugin) is that they’re billed by that plugin during this window. Benecaster can’t intercept a separate plugin’s billing on your behalf. That’s why the admin warning is prominent and why auto-upgrade is the default — most podcasters want the situation resolved automatically rather than managing it manually.