Do subscribers have to re-subscribe to keep following the show after cancelling?
It depends on whether you offer a free membership tier — and this distinction is one of the more compelling reasons to have one.
If you have a free membership tier: A subscriber who no longer wants to pay can downgrade to the free tier instead of cancelling outright. Because their feed URL doesn’t change — it just starts serving free-tier content — the show stays in their podcast app exactly as it was. Nothing to re-add, no URL to update. They remain on your list, receiving free-tier episodes and your broadcast emails.
If you don’t have a free tier (or they cancel entirely): Their private feed URL stops working when their token is revoked. Your public podcast feed is still live at a separate URL, but their podcast app still has the old private feed URL — not the public one. To keep following the show on the public feed, they’d need to manually subscribe to the public feed URL in their app. It’s not complicated, but it is a step.
On Patreon, cancellation is a hard exit regardless: the patron’s private feed URL goes dark with no fallback, and if they want to come back later, they’re starting from scratch — finding the Patreon page, resubscribing, receiving a new feed URL, re-adding it to their app. The show effectively disappears until they do all of that.
The free-tier downgrade path is why many podcasters offer a free tier even when they don’t actively promote it — it’s an invisible off-ramp that keeps cancelled subscribers in the app rather than losing them to attrition.
