benecaster_get_subscriber_count()

Returns how many active tokens a show has issued. It is an audience size, not a paying-subscriber count, and the two numbers are routinely different — often by a wide margin on a show with a large free following.

The name reads like a billing figure and is not one. It counts every active row for the show: paying subscribers, free-tier bridge members, and direct followers alike. Using it as a paying count over-reports, and does so silently.

It does not affect licensing, plan limits, or billing, and nothing in core reads it. ⚠ In particular it does NOT affect licence tier upgrade thresholds. The plan limit, the threshold notices, and the daily licence-server report are all decided from a separate paying-only count taken straight from the database, on a code path that never calls this function.