The Account Panel

The Account panel lives in Benecaster → Settings → Account. It shows each show’s connection to your Benecaster license, how your plan’s limits are enforced, and where to change your plan.

Shows

Each active show has a card that names it and gives its connection state:

• Connected · [plan] — the show is on your license. The card shows the show’s paying subscribers against your plan’s limit, for example Paid Subscribers: 41 / 250, or the count alone on a plan with no limit.
• Not connected — the show charges for access but has not been connected yet. Connect takes you to the show’s Subscription settings, where you connect it. See Connecting Your Site.
• Reconnect required — benecaster.com no longer accepts this show’s connection. Reconnect takes you to the same place. See License Activation and Connection Issues.
• Free — public feed — the show doesn’t charge, so it needs no license.

Every show on the site shares one license, so every connected card names the same plan.

Once a show is connected, your site checks in with benecaster.com daily to keep your plan status current. There is no key or token for you to copy or manage.

Limit Enforcement

Two choices decide what happens when you go over a limit: one for your paying subscriber limit, one for your total token cap. Each is Upgrade my plan automatically or Cap at the limit — I’ll upgrade manually. Click Save preferences to apply them. The choice is saved on benecaster.com, which is where it takes effect. On Pro, Multi-Show and Studio there are no limits, and the section says so.

How Subscriber Limits Work explains what each choice does.

Plan Changes

Upgrade plan opens a dialog where you pick a higher plan and see the price before you confirm. The charge goes on the card already on file. On a staging copy of your site the button is replaced by a link to your account page. See Upgrading Your Plan.

Which plan to pick depends on what you are running out of, because the plans move along two different axes:

• More subscribers. Launch → Starter → Growth → Pro. Pro is the top of this ladder — there is no larger single-show plan, because Pro already has no paying-subscriber limit.
• More shows. Multi-Show carries up to 3 shows across up to 3 WordPress installations. It is not “above” Pro; it is sideways from it. A Growth customer who needs a second show wants Multi-Show, not Pro.
• Both, plus everything else. Studio sits above both ladders and includes every podcaster add-on. The CRM Sync add-ons are sold separately on every plan, Studio included.

So from Pro the upgrade is Studio, or Multi-Show if what you actually need is a second show rather than more subscribers. From Multi-Show it is Studio.

Moving down a plan happens on your account page at benecaster.com. Under the Upgrade plan button, the section tells you whether you can move to a smaller plan now. When you can, it links to Change your plan.

Your benecaster.com Account Page

Your account page is at benecaster.com/my-account/. If your session has expired, you sign in with your password, or with Email me a sign-in link, which sends a one-time link to the email address on your benecaster.com account. The link works once and expires 15 minutes after it’s sent; if it doesn’t arrive within a few minutes, check your spam folder or request another. Use the account page to see your plan and usage, change or cancel your plan, update your card, name or billing address, read your invoices, see which sites are connected (and disconnect one), and see which add-ons are on your license.

The rest of the Account tab holds Telemetry, your choice of whether to share anonymous usage data (see Sharing Anonymous Usage Data), and My Profile, your own WordPress name, email and password.

Refer a Friend

Your referral link, code and credit are not on this tab. They are on the Refer a Friend page in the Benecaster menu. See Refer a Friend → for how the program works.

Validating Manually

To check your license straight away, go to Settings → Tools → License and click Run license check now. It runs the same check as the daily one against benecaster.com and shows the result: status, plan and when it was last validated. Use it after upgrading your plan to apply the new tier without waiting for the next daily check.

Disconnecting a Site

There are three places you can disconnect a site, and you never need to contact support to do it. Deactivating Your Site Connection is the full walkthrough — how to disconnect, what happens to your subscribers and feeds afterwards, and how to reconnect.

From the site itself — the Benecaster plugin, on the site you’re removing. This is the ordinary route.

From your account page on benecaster.com — My Account → Shows & add-ons → Connected shows lists every site on your license with its show name, its address and when it was last active, and gives each row a Disconnect button. Confirming names the exact site address, so you can tell two similarly-named shows apart. This is the route to use when you can’t reach the site — it’s been deleted, sold, or you’ve lost access to it — because nothing has to happen on that site for it to work.

From the connect screen, when you’re at your site limit — try to connect one site more than your plan allows and that screen lists your connected sites with the same details and the same Disconnect button, so you can free a slot without leaving the flow you’re in.

The Connected shows panel also shows how many slots you’re using — “2 of 3 shows connected”, or a plain count on Multi-Show and Studio, where there is no site limit.

Staging connections are listed on your account page and can be disconnected there, though doing so frees nothing — a site benecaster.com recognises as staging, or that support has marked, doesn’t count toward your site limit. On the connect screen they’re listed without a Disconnect button for the same reason. A site in staging mode at an address benecaster.com doesn’t recognise is counted like any other site; see Staging Site Counted Against Your Show Limit.

Disconnecting stops that show’s subscriber delivery straight away. There is no grace window for a disconnection — subscriber feed URLs return an error from the next request, and the audio stops downloading with them, including for episodes already sitting in subscribers’ apps. This is not the same as a billing problem, which does open a grace window; see Payment Failure and Recovery for that timeline.

So free a slot from a show that is not actively serving subscribers. If you are at your site limit and disconnecting to make room, pick the show nobody is listening to — a staging site, a retired show, a site you have already moved off. Disconnecting a live show to connect another one takes the first show’s audience offline for as long as it stays disconnected.

Nothing is lost, and recovery is immediate. Subscriber records, feed tokens and history are all kept. Reconnecting restores delivery on the next request, on the same feed URLs, with nothing required from your subscribers.

Your public feed keeps working throughout, and after. So do your follower feeds. The show runs as the free WordPress.org version of Benecaster until you reconnect.