Switch to Benecaster — Migrate Your Podcast Subscribers

Yes — with one important caveat: payment cannot be migrated. Patreon’s billing relationship stays with Patreon, and there is no way to transfer a patron’s payment method to your site. Each patron has to actively re-subscribe and enter payment details on your end. The grace period (30, 60, or 90 days) exists to give them time to do that without losing feed access in the meantime.

What the Migration Wizard does handle: importing your Patreon patron CSV, mapping your tier names to Benecaster subscription levels, creating WordPress user accounts, generating private feed URLs, and sending your patrons a configurable migration email sequence. No one loses their feed during the transition — they just need to complete the payment step on your site before the grace period expires.

The wizard includes a migration dashboard showing the full funnel: imported → emailed → clicked → subscribed → dropped off. You can resend to non-completers at any time.

Migration Wizard is included free with Growth, Pro, Multi-Show, and Studio. For Launch and Starter, it’s available as a one-time add-on purchase ($79).

You do. Every subscriber token, email address, feed access log, and billing relationship lives in your WordPress database on your server. None of that ever reaches Benecaster.

What Benecaster does receive: aggregate, non-identifying data — subscriber counts by tier, geographic totals (e.g., “45 subscribers in Texas”), listening pattern distributions, churn rate — sent as part of the daily license validation ping if you’ve opted in to telemetry. No subscriber emails, names, feed URLs, or any personally identifying information is ever transmitted. Benecaster’s license server cannot identify any individual subscriber from what it receives.

Export your subscriber list anytime. Migrate to a different membership plugin, move hosts, shut down your Patreon — your data goes with you and no one else has a copy of it.

See exactly what the validation ping sends →

No. Migration is an option, not a requirement.

You can start Benecaster for new subscribers today while your Patreon keeps running exactly as it is. Existing patrons aren’t asked to do anything. Their access is uninterrupted. Your Patreon revenue doesn’t move.

The reason most podcasters hesitate on migration isn’t the technical steps — it’s income risk. Ask 200 subscribers to switch platforms and some percentage won’t get around to it. Not because they’ve stopped valuing your show, but because people don’t always complete tasks that require effort, even easy ones. A well-run migration with a good email sequence and a 90-day grace period will still see some attrition. That attrition is real money, and the fear of it is a reasonable reason to pause.

Running both removes that risk entirely. Your Patreon revenue is untouched. New subscribers come in on Benecaster from day one. When your Benecaster base has grown enough that migration feels low-stakes rather than bet-the-income — you can move your Patreon patrons then, on your timeline. Or let the Patreon side wind down naturally as subscribers lapse and don’t renew there. Or keep running both indefinitely. Benecaster works either way.

To see your full picture while running both: export your Patreon patron list and upload it at Benecaster → Shows → [Your Show] → Visibility. Your Subscribers screen shows Patreon patrons alongside your Benecaster subscribers — separate counts, combined total. Re-upload any time you want a current snapshot.

Analytics while running both: Uploading your Patreon patron list is a manual step and gives you headcount visibility, not the full analytics picture. Benecaster’s Analytics Dashboard tracks growth trends, churn, tier movement, episode downloads, and cohort retention — but only for subscribers in Benecaster. Your Patreon patrons’ data lives in Patreon’s dashboard, not yours. As long as you’re running both, you’re reading two separate dashboards to understand one audience. The cleanest analytics picture — a single place to see all subscriber growth, engagement, and revenue trends — comes from having everyone in Benecaster.

This is not a Patreon-only technique. The same approach works for any platform the Migration Wizard imports — Supercast and Castos included. Import the subscriber list while you are still running the other platform, and Benecaster builds the historical picture even though those subscribers are still active elsewhere. See Can Benecaster import my Castos subscriber list? for the same pattern described from the Castos side.

Your Patreon patrons don’t count toward your Benecaster plan. You’re billed on your Benecaster subscribers only, so the Launch plan ($0, up to 10 paying subscribers) stays free until the Benecaster side of your audience crosses that threshold on its own.

Move your audio files to a podcast hosting provider first. Benecaster doesn’t host audio — it generates RSS feeds that point at audio URLs on your existing host. If your audio lives on Patreon’s servers, your feed will break the moment your Patreon account is closed.

The Migration Wizard includes a pre-migration checklist step that surfaces this requirement before subscriber import begins. Recommended hosts for podcasters moving from Patreon: Buzzsprout, Transistor, Libsyn, Captivate, or S3. Most offer import tools to bring episodes over from another host.

The technical steps — importing the CSV, creating accounts, generating feeds, sending the first migration email — take minutes. The migration completes over the grace period you choose (30, 60, or 90 days), as patrons receive their email, click through, and set up payment on your site.

Plan for a 4–6 week active migration window for most shows. The Migration Wizard tracks completion in real time so you know exactly where everyone is.

No — with a few exceptions worth knowing about.

Benecaster gates the RSS feed, not the audio. Your audio files stay wherever they are. Benecaster generates an RSS feed pointing directly at your existing hosted audio URLs. No migration, no bandwidth cost to your WordPress server.

Platforms you’ll need to move off:

Spotify. Spotify creates two separate problems for private podcast setups:

• Spotify for Podcasters as your audio host — If your audio is currently hosted through Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor), moving to a private subscriber model requires switching audio hosts first. Spotify for Podcasters bundles hosting and distribution in a closed platform; the audio URLs it generates aren’t designed to be used independently in another feed.

• Spotify as a distribution platform — Spotify only accepts open, public RSS feeds. Private subscriber feeds — Benecaster’s or anyone else’s — can’t be submitted to Spotify. Your public free episodes can still be listed on Spotify; your private subscriber content can’t. This is a Spotify platform decision, not a Benecaster limitation, but it’s worth knowing before you commit to a subscriber model.

Patreon. If your audio is currently hosted through Patreon, you’ll need to move it to a standard podcast host before switching to Benecaster. Patreon bundles audio hosting with its membership platform — the audio URLs it generates aren’t portable to an independent feed. Any major podcast host (Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Transistor, Captivate, Podbean, S3, etc.) works as a replacement.

A platform that works, but ties you to the subscription:

Castos. Castos-hosted audio sits at ordinary URLs, so a Benecaster feed can point straight at them and everything works normally — no migration needed to get started. The catch is that those files belong to Castos, so Castos decides how long those URLs keep working. So you can run Benecaster alongside Castos indefinitely, but you can’t count on the audio once you cancel Castos. If your goal is to leave Castos entirely, move your audio files to a host you control first and update the audio URLs on your episodes before you cancel. If you’re keeping Castos for hosting and only using Benecaster for private subscriber feeds, nothing needs to move at all.

Every other major podcast host works without changes.

Yes. The Migration Wizard accepts Supercast CSV exports and auto-detects the format from the column structure. Upload your Supercast subscriber export, map your plan names to Benecaster subscription tiers, set a grace period, and the wizard creates private feed URLs and sends your subscribers a migration email sequence.

See the full migration walkthrough →

If you’re migrating from Patreon: your subscribers currently have Patreon-issued feed URLs, and there’s no way to carry them over, because Patreon controls them. Each patron’s Patreon feed only works while their own Patreon membership is active, so it stops when that patron’s membership ends, not when you close your account. The Migration Wizard generates new Benecaster feed URLs and sends them to your patrons, so make sure they have their new URL before they cancel on Patreon.

If your episode audio is hosted on Patreon, move it to a podcast host before you migrate anyone. Benecaster points your feed at audio on your own hosting, and audio left on Patreon stops being reachable. See Moving Audio Files Off Patreon.

If you’re migrating from Supercast: the same situation applies. Your subscribers will receive new Benecaster feed URLs via the migration email sequence and will need to swap the URL in their podcast app. This is true even if you serve your Supercast feed through your own custom domain: each subscriber’s URL carries a token Supercast issued, which Benecaster cannot recognise, so repointing the domain does not keep existing URLs working.

If you’re migrating from Castos: Castos private feed URLs are served from Castos’s domain, so the same situation applies as Patreon — subscribers will receive new Benecaster feed URLs and will need to swap the URL in their podcast app. Their old Castos feed keeps working until you close your Castos account.

The migration grace period is separate from all of this: it is how long migrated subscribers keep their Benecaster access before they need to set up payment.

The Setup Service is a personal, hands-on service where we configure everything on your WordPress installation — plugin install, membership plugin bridge, feed setup, email templates, subscriber account page. For migrations, it includes the full Patreon or Supercast CSV import, subscriber notification sequence, and post-migration monitoring.

Studio customers receive a Setup Service discount. See the Setup Service page → for tiers and pricing.

Setup is bought per show, because it’s done per show: each podcast can have Standard Setup once and Migration + Setup once. Migration + Setup includes everything in Standard Setup, so a show that has it doesn’t need both. A show that started with Standard Setup can move up to Migration + Setup later.

Your second show costs 20% less. Once you have a setup service on any of your shows, under any license on your account, every later setup purchase is 20% off list. Studio’s included Migration + Setup counts as your first show. The discount is applied for you on My Account, and at checkout when you’re signed in with your own email. Both services in one order on a plan covering more than one show also takes it, on Migration + Setup, signed in or not. Your receipt shows it as Second show discount (20%).

On Studio, setup already has its own lower prices, so the 20% doesn’t come off those. And discounts never stack: if you also have a setup coupon, you pay whichever price is lowest. See Services for current prices.

The Migration Wizard accepts CSV files (.csv). Excel files (.xlsx, .xls) are not supported — if your subscriber list is in a spreadsheet, you’ll need to export or save it as a CSV first. Most spreadsheet apps make this a one-step export. See how to export a spreadsheet to CSV →

Patreon and Supercast exports are recognised from their column structure, with the field mappings pre-filled. Hello Audio, Memberful and Castos each have their own choice in the wizard, with export instructions and audio advice, and the visual field mapper lets you assign columns manually. For any other CSV format or a custom subscriber spreadsheet, choose Somewhere else, which uses the same mapper. As long as your file has an email address column, the import will work.

Growth, Pro, Multi-Show, and Studio all include Migration Wizard at no extra cost. For Launch and Starter, it’s available as a one-time add-on purchase ($79). Migration Wizard is a one-time-use tool — you pay once for the migration event, not annually.

If your plan includes it, there is nothing to buy — the entitlement is granted with the plan, and you’ll never be charged for it separately.