Setting Tier Availability

Episode availability controls when each tier gains access to an episode. You can release an episode to all tiers at the same moment, or stagger access so your premium subscribers hear it days or weeks before everyone else.

This is Benecaster’s own scheduling system — separate from any scheduling or drip feature in your membership plugin. Membership plugin drip rules do not affect your RSS feeds.

How It Works

Each episode has an availability date per tier. When that date and time arrives, Benecaster adds the episode to that tier’s feed. The feed cache is cleared automatically, so subscribers polling within the next few minutes see the new episode.

Availability is checked every five minutes. An episode set to unlock at 9:00 AM will be in subscribers’ feeds by 9:05 AM at the latest. That five-minute check is for dates arriving on their own — if you edit a date yourself and save, it takes effect immediately, not on the next check. See Changing Your Mind below.

Which clock: every date and time you enter, and every one Benecaster shows you back, is in your site’s timezone — the one set in Settings → General → Timezone. Not the subscriber’s, and not UTC.

That matters for a listener abroad. An episode you unlock at 9:00 AM unlocks for everyone at the same instant, which is a different local time wherever they are — 9:00 AM for you is 2:00 PM for a subscriber five hours ahead. “Available at 9am” is your 9am. If you announce a release time to your audience, say which timezone you mean.

What “available” means: Once an episode is available to a tier, it appears in every subscriber at that tier’s private RSS feed. Their podcast app will see it on the next poll — typically within a few hours depending on the app’s update schedule.

Show Defaults

Each show can have a default availability — a pattern that new episodes follow automatically. Set it once in Benecaster → Shows → [your show] → Settings → Details → Advanced → Default availability and forget about it for routine episodes.

Every tier the show has is listed there. On a show using built-in membership, that is its tiers in Memberships → Tiers order; a tier you have retired is listed too, marked (inactive), because retiring a tier only stops new sign-ups and its existing members still get what is scheduled for it. On a show using a membership plugin, the list is the tiers from its tier mapping.

The Public tier comes first. Every show using built-in membership has a Public tier, and it is listed at the top here and on every episode’s Access tab. It starts unticked. A date for the Public tier is the only thing that puts an episode in your public feed and opens it to visitors who aren’t signed in, and nothing gets one automatically: a members-only show stays members-only until you tick Public here or date an episode for it. On a show using a membership plugin, the same role belongs to whichever level you mapped to the public tier in Tier Mapping.

For each tier, tick it and enter how many days after release it gets a new episode (0 is release day, up to 365), or leave it unticked for Never — the defaults give that tier no date.

A typical early-access show might look like:

A new episode follows these defaults until you set its own dates. While it follows them, Benecaster works its tier dates out from the episode’s web publish date every time you save it — so if you move the publish date, the unlocks move with it. A tier the defaults say Never gets no date, and loses any date it had. No per-episode work is needed for your standard release pattern.

Default Release Time, just below Default availability, sets the time of day those unlocks happen. Leave it blank and each episode unlocks at its own publish time.

Changing the defaults does not touch episodes that have their own dates.

Overriding Dates per Episode

For episodes that don’t fit the default pattern — a trailer, a bonus episode for all tiers, a special early release — you can set dates individually.

Open the episode editor’s Access tab and look at Tier Availability. It lists the same tiers as the show’s Default availability, in the same order, with any retired built-in tier marked (inactive).

While the episode follows the show’s defaults, the tab says “Using this show’s default availability. The dates are worked out from the web publish date each time you save.” and lists each tier’s rule with the date it works out to. Click Override dates for this episode to give it its own dates.

If the show has no default availability, the tab says so instead: the episode has no tier dates and is not in any feed until you give it some. Click Set dates for this episode, or set up the show’s defaults first.

With its own dates, each tier has a timeline and a date-and-time input. Set the date and time each tier should gain access, in your site’s timezone. To keep the episode from a tier, clear that tier’s date with the × beside its name (Remove availability date) — a tier with no date never gets the episode until you give it one. Changes save when you save the episode.

To go back to the show’s defaults, click Use show defaults at the top of Tier Availability. The dates are worked out again from the defaults when you save.

Other Access

An episode can carry access under a name that is none of the show’s tiers, its Public tier, its followers or its buy-ups. Usually that is an episode sold on its own, or a tier or add-on that has since been removed. When an episode has any, an Other Access section appears at the bottom of its Access tab, listing each name with its date. It does not appear on an episode that has not been saved yet.

Each entry has a Remove button. Removing one asks you to confirm first: “Listeners who bought access under “…” will lose this episode. Remove it only if nothing sells it any more. This takes effect now, without saving the episode.” Click Remove access to go ahead or Cancel to keep it. A removal is immediate: that one entry is deleted and the show’s feed cache is cleared, and saving the episode afterwards neither removes nor restores anything listed here.

Benecaster never removes one of these on its own. Remove one only when nothing sells that access any more. Moving an episode to another show is refused while it carries one (see Episodes Overview).

Immediate Availability

Setting a tier’s availability date to the publish date (or any time in the past) means that tier gets access as soon as the episode is published. Tiers set to a future date remain locked until that date arrives. A tier with no date stays locked indefinitely — the episode never appears in that tier’s feed until you give it a date.

If you want all tiers to get access at the same time, set the same date across all tiers — or set all offsets to zero in your show defaults.

Common Configurations

Early access for premium subscribers

Set Premium to the publish date and Basic/Free to 3–14 days later. Premium subscribers hear each episode immediately; everyone else hears it after the delay. This is the most common use of availability scheduling.

Simultaneous release to all tiers

Set all tier offsets to zero. Every subscriber gets every episode at the same time — availability still controls when the episode goes live in feeds, but there’s no stagger.

Evergreen back catalog

Leave back-catalog episodes with all tiers at the same date (typically their original publish date). New episodes stagger. Subscribers who join today get immediate access to everything already published, and staggered access to new releases going forward.

Premium-only episodes

Give Premium a date and clear the Basic and Free dates. Only Premium subscribers see the episode in their feed. Useful for bonus content that’s genuinely exclusive rather than just early.

Availability and the Episode Page

Availability dates decide who can play an episode on your website as well as in feeds:

• Everyone, signed in or not, once the date for the tier whose slug is public (the one your public feed carries) has passed.
• A signed-in listener before that, once their own tier’s date has passed, or if they hold a buy-up the episode requires.
• Nobody, if the episode has no availability dates at all.

A member never gets less than a stranger: once the public date passes, every listener can play it.

The episode page itself has a separate Web publish date, the date the page becomes visible on the site. A common pattern is to publish the page immediately, so it appears in your site archive and is shareable, while the dates above stagger who can play it. Until a visitor’s date passes, the page shows them its locked state instead of the player.

Availability and Email Notifications

If you have the Email Editor add-on installed and episode notifications enabled, Benecaster sends subscribers an email when an episode becomes available to their tier. Each tier gets the email at its own availability time — Premium subscribers get notified immediately, Basic subscribers get notified three days later, and so on.

See Episode Notifications for setup.

Changing Your Mind

A date change takes effect immediately, in either direction. Saving an episode’s availability clears that show’s feed cache right away — there’s no waiting for the five-minute check above. Move a tier’s date earlier and the episode appears in that tier’s feed on the next request. Move it later — even back past a date that already passed — and it disappears just as fast, whether you’re fixing an episode you meant to hold back or reconsidering something you’d already released.

Clearing a tier’s date takes the episode out of that tier’s feed. Click the × beside a tier on the Access tab and save, and the episode leaves that tier’s feed straight away — the feed cache is cleared at the same moment. Clear every tier and it leaves every tier feed. Buy-up Access is separate and stays as it is: if the episode is unlocked by a required buy-up, buyers of that buy-up keep it. This works the same on a show using built-in membership and on one using a membership plugin.

For example: if you accidentally leave Free at the publish date instead of your usual delay, catch it, and change Free’s date to two weeks out, the episode comes back out of the Free feed as soon as you save. You don’t need to wait for anything, and there’s no separate “undo.”

The one thing you can’t take back is a copy someone already has. Once a subscriber’s podcast app has fetched the episode — downloaded the audio, or just cached that RSS entry — pulling the availability date back doesn’t reach into their device and remove it. New requests to that tier’s feed stop returning the episode; whatever already went out stays out. The faster you catch a mistake, the fewer people this applies to.

What Availability Does Not Do

Availability does not replace your membership plugin’s subscription gating. A subscriber still needs an active subscription at the right tier to have a feed at all. Availability controls the episode schedule within the feed — it assumes the subscriber already has feed access.

Availability is not the same as your membership plugin’s drip feature. Membership plugin drip rules apply to WordPress page/post access — they hide pages on your website based on how long someone has been a member. They have no effect on Benecaster’s RSS feeds. Use Benecaster availability dates to control when episodes appear in feeds. See Content Drip and Membership Plugins.