Do subscribers have to re-subscribe to keep following the show after cancelling?
No. On Benecaster’s default settings, a cancelled subscriber keeps the show in their podcast app and has nothing to re-add. Their feed URL never changes — only what it serves does.
What they receive after cancelling depends on two of your settings:
| Your setup | What happens when they cancel |
|---|---|
| You offer a free membership tier | They can drop to it instead of leaving. The feed URL keeps working and starts serving free-tier episodes. They stay on your list and keep getting your broadcast emails. |
| No free tier, or they cancel outright | Their private token is revoked and the same URL quietly serves your public feed. No error, no broken feed, no disappearing show — new public episodes keep arriving, private ones stop. |
| Strict mode switched on | The feed URL stops working. Revoked tokens return a 403 and most apps treat the show as unavailable. |
Strict mode lives in Show Settings → Settings → Feeds → Cancelled subscriber feeds, and is worth turning on only if your content licensing requires a hard cutoff.
On Patreon, cancellation is always a hard exit: the patron’s private feed URL goes dark with no fallback. 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. But even without a free tier, Benecaster’s default keeps the show present in their app.