benecaster_cutoff_billing_pause_complete
What it is for: telling something outside Benecaster that a group of your subscribers just stopped being billed, so your own records do not go on saying they are paying customers. A CRM, an analytics warehouse, a Slack channel, your own emails — anything that mirrors subscriber state needs to hear about this, because nothing else will tell it.
Why the sweep happens at all: when a podcaster’s own Benecaster license reaches Day-30 hard cutoff their feeds go dark, and Benecaster pauses collection on every built-in-membership Stripe subscription so nobody keeps paying full price for a feed that has stopped. This action reports the outcome of that sweep. It fires once per sweep, not once per subscriber.
Each subscription that paused successfully is tagged GRACE_TIMEOUT in benecaster_subscriptions.paused_reason (see PauseReasons for the full set), which is what lets the later resume restore exactly this cohort and nothing else.
Hook this for $failures and $skipped_shows, not for $paused. The count says the happy path worked; the two arrays say who is still being charged for a feed that has stopped. Benecaster already raises a dashboard notice naming the affected shows — hook this when a dashboard notice is not enough, which on a site with real subscribers it usually is not.
Pausing is not cancelling. A paused Stripe subscription keeps its history, payment method and customer relationship, and resumes cleanly if the license is brought current. Nothing here cancels or refunds anything, and closing a subscription for good stays the podcaster’s decision.
The worked example covers both sweeps, including why a resume failure is the inverse harm and what to do about $skipped_shows.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
$paused |
int |
— | Subscriptions successfully paused and tagged. |
$failures |
array |
— | **The argument that matters.** One entry per subscription the Stripe call failed on, each `{ subscription_id: string, show_id: int, message: string }`. Every entry is a subscriber still being charged for a feed that returns an error — the exact outcome this sweep exists to prevent. Empty on a clean run. Treat a non-empty array as an incident, not as telemetry. |
$skipped_shows |
array |
— | Shows the sweep could not act on at all, as `show_id => reason`. Two reasons: `test_mode` — the show is configured for test mode while holding live subscriptions, so Benecaster cannot reach them; `no_keys` — its Stripe credentials are missing or unusable. Every subscriber on a skipped show keeps paying. Empty on a clean run. |
Notes
Do not write to paused_reason from a callback on this hook. The column is the only local record that a subscription is paused at all — Stripe leaves subscription.status as active while pause_collection is set — and the resume sweep selects on it. See PauseReasons.
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