is 6.5% monthly churn normal four months into a $19/mo solo tool Churn Cohort

6.5% at month 4 on a $19 self-serve product sold to individuals is unremarkable. The 3% benchmark you keep reading is for products sold to companies, where the buyer is not the user and cancelling requires someone to do paperwork. Different physics entirely.

But blended monthly churn is close to useless at your size and here is why: your churn number is dominated by whoever signed up most recently, and recent signups always churn hardest. Nothing about your product changed, your mix did.

What you want is retention by signup cohort. Rows are the month someone signed up, columns are months since. Something like:

cohort   m1   m2   m3   m4
mar     100%  71%  63%  59%
apr     100%  74%  66%
may     100%  69%

The question is not "is 6.5% good". It is "does the curve flatten". If each cohort loses a third in month 1 and then stabilises around 60%, you have a healthy product with a bad onboarding. If the curve keeps sloping down at month 6, you have a product that people finish using and there is no amount of onboarding work that fixes it.

You have four months of data. You can build this in a single SQL query and it will tell you more than every benchmark article combined.

Also separate logo churn from revenue churn. 14 people leaving matters differently depending on whether they were 14 of your smallest or included two of your biggest. At a flat $19 those are the same number, so the moment you add a higher tier, start tracking both - they diverge fast and revenue churn is the one that pays your rent.

And do the arithmetic on what 6.5% compounds to: about half your current base is gone in ten months. Normal is not the same as fine.

Add a cancel survey with real options rather than a free text box. "Too expensive", "missing a feature", "solved the problem and I'm done", "switched to something else", "never got it working". Free text gets you polite non-answers because people do not want to be mean to a solo founder.

"not using it enough" almost always means "never started using it". Go look at what your churned users actually did in week 1 versus your retained ones. In every product I have measured there is a single action that separates them - imported data, invited someone, connected an integration, whatever the equivalent is for you.

Find that action, measure what percentage of new signups complete it in the first 7 days, and then work on that number instead of on churn. Churn is downstream of activation and much harder to move directly.

One thing that is genuinely normal and rarely said: some products are legitimately seasonal or project-shaped. If your tool helps with a thing people do for six weeks and then stop, churn is not a defect, it is the shape of the demand, and the fix is pricing that matches it rather than a monthly subscription that pretends otherwise.

Four months in and you are already running cohorts. Most people at month four are still picking a font.