Migrating from Supercast

Supercast and Benecaster do the same job — private podcast RSS delivery with subscriber authentication — which makes this one of the cleanest migrations you can do. Before you move anyone, check where your episode audio lives.

Before You Migrate: Audio Hosting

Benecaster does not host audio. Your new feed points at the same audio files your Supercast feed does, so whoever holds those files has to keep serving them after you leave.

• If your episodes live with a podcast host and Supercast only delivers the private feed, there is nothing to move. The migration is purely about subscriber access.
• If you uploaded audio to Supercast directly, Supercast is hosting it. Those files belong to Supercast, so Supercast decides how long they keep working. Move them to a podcast host before you migrate, following the steps in Moving Audio Files Off Patreon — they apply to Supercast just the same.

Not sure which applies? The wizard’s Check my feed reads your current feed and tells you where the audio is served from. Unlike the Patreon path, the wizard does not stop you continuing here, so it is worth the click.

What You’ll Need

• A Supercast subscriber export (CSV) from your Supercast dashboard
• The Migration Wizard — one wizard handles all supported platforms including Supercast. Included free with Growth, Pro, Multi-Show, and Studio; available separately for Starter.
• Your Benecaster show and tiers set up before you begin

The Migration Flow

1. Export your subscriber list from your Supercast dashboard as a CSV
2. In your WordPress admin, go to Benecaster → Shows, open the show you are migrating, then Settings → Migration (on a show that has already run an import, the tab opens on the migration dashboard; click Start another import). The first step offers a backup of your Benecaster data; after that, choose Supercast as where you are migrating from and upload the CSV
3. If the wizard recognizes the format, it pre-fills the column mappings for you — confirm them and continue. If it doesn’t, it asks you to match your columns to Benecaster’s fields once, which takes a minute
4. Map your Supercast plan names to your Benecaster subscription tiers. If the show takes payments through a membership plugin such as MemberPress, you map to the tiers linked to that plugin’s levels instead, and give each paid tier its signup page on this site — see If You Take Payments Through a Membership Plugin. On a show using Benecaster’s own membership, if a tier you need doesn’t exist yet, the card links to Memberships → Tiers: create it there, with its price, then click Reload tiers and pick it. A tier created without a price is free, so anyone mapped to it would not be asked to pay
5. Before anything is imported, run through the wizard’s short checklist — Before we bring your subscribers over: that your podcast host is reachable from this site, that your Benecaster tiers are set up, and whether your feed uses a custom domain. It is preparation, not a gate; none of it stops you continuing. Beside the podcast-host item, Check my feed reads your current feed and tells you where your episode audio is served from — worth a click, since your new feed will point at the same files. See Moving Audio Files Off Patreon for what its answers mean.
6. Set a grace period — how long migrated subscribers keep their Benecaster access before they need to set up payment
7. The wizard creates Benecaster accounts and private feed URLs for each subscriber. Leave Send the migration email sequence on if you want Benecaster to email each subscriber their new feed link, their deadline and reminders; switch it off only if you will tell them yourself. See Grace Period and Migration Emails for what each setting sends

After the import, the wizard offers to bring your episodes across too, as drafts — see Migrating Paying Subscribers. See Migration Dashboard for tracking progress and re-sending to non-completers.

Join dates. If your export includes the date each subscriber joined, the wizard carries it across, so their tenure badge reflects the time they have already been with you. Dates must be written year-month-day (2021-03-04). One the wizard cannot read never stops a subscriber being imported: they start their tenure on the day of the import and are listed in the import report. The details are the same as for Patreon; see Keeping a Patron’s Original Join Date.

Free plans. If you offered a free plan on Supercast, you choose where its members land when you map your plans. The default is your followers list: they get your public episodes through their own feed link. If you have a free Benecaster tier, you can put them there instead. They are never mapped to a paid tier, and either way they do not use a paid subscriber slot. The details are the same as for Patreon; see Free Members.

Cancelled subscribers. Supercast’s export can include people who have cancelled. Export only your active subscribers — that is the reliable way to leave them behind.

The wizard also looks for a status column reading cancelled, canceled, expired or churned, leaves those people out by default, tells you how many before you run the import, and lets you bring them across if you want to. Anyone left out is listed in the import report. We have not yet checked those words against a real Supercast export, though, so don’t count on this check: if Supercast writes the status some other way, or leaves it out of the file, the wizard imports everyone rather than risk leaving out a current subscriber.

Explicit-Content Field

Supercast exports carry no explicit-content field, so imported episodes are left on Inherit from show and take whatever your show’s Explicit setting says.

Benecaster does not guess a value here. Defaulting imported episodes to “clean” because the source said nothing would be inventing a fact — and on a show marked explicit it would silently override the entire imported catalogue the wrong way.

Check the show-level Explicit value before publishing. Set it in Shows → Settings → Feeds; it is what your whole imported catalogue reports to Apple Podcasts and other directories. If the show is mostly explicit with a few exceptions, set the show to Yes and mark those episodes No individually.

See Show Settings and Creating Episodes.

Feed URLs

Each subscriber’s current feed URL is Supercast’s: it is served from Supercast’s domain and carries a token only Supercast recognises. It cannot carry across. The migration email sequence sends each subscriber their new Benecaster feed URL, with one-tap buttons for the common podcast apps. They add it once and they’re done.

A custom domain doesn’t change this. Even if your Supercast feed is served from a domain you control, such as feed.mypodcast.com, pointing that domain at your WordPress site won’t keep your subscribers’ existing URLs working. The token in each URL was issued by Supercast, and Benecaster has no way to recognise it. Every subscriber needs their new URL.

Don’t close your Supercast account the day you import. Subscribers’ old URLs keep working for as long as your Supercast account does, so leave it open until your subscribers have had time to add their new feed.