How to cancel Duolingo

Canceling takes about four taps. The part that catches people is that there are three different routes and the right one is decided by a fact most subscribers have forgotten: which company took the money. Duolingo documents all three, in one article, organized by exactly that question, which is better filing than Rocket Money manages. The same fact then decides something the article is less clear about: whether anyone at Duolingo is able to refund you.

Three routes, and the question that picks one

All of this is from Duolingo's cancellation article, read on 22 September 2026.

The third row is the uneven one. An iPhone subscriber who started from device settings gets a link to Apple's page and can finish in a minute. The Android equivalent is “submit a support request” — an email, and a wait — even though Google's own page documents the self-service flow that would answer it. Alipay in the first row is the third billing rail, and it appears nowhere else in the article.

Deleting the app does not cancel it, and three companies say so

No sentence in this subject gets repeated more, which suggests how often it is the real problem.

Two companies with no reason to coordinate, plus a contract, all warning about the same mistake. The warning is prominent in all three places. People delete the app anyway, thinking that cancels it.

Apple lists several subscriptions with the same name

If the store took your money, the store's list is where you cancel — and on Apple that list is harder to read than it should be. Expanding the In-App Purchases row on Duolingo's App Store listing on 22 September 2026 gave ten items, which is Apple's cap and therefore possibly a sample.

Six of the ten are called “Super Duolingo”, and $119.99 appears twice under that identical name. Apple attaches no billing period to any of them. Looking at this list, you can’t tell a monthly plan from an annual one, or a family plan from an individual one, by name and price alone. The four gem packs are one-off purchases and will not appear in a subscriptions list at all. Apple prints whatever names the developer registered, so this is a naming choice, but it is the list a person uses to decide which row to cancel.

Read again on 3 November 2026, the list had five items named “Super Duolingo” ($9.99, $12.99, $83.99, $95.99, $119.99), and the duplicate $119.99 was gone. A fifth gem pack, Chest of Gems (1200) at $4.99, took the freed slot.

Google Play's price line comes and goes

Play's listing carries a Contains ads · In-app purchases badge with no figure attached, which is the normal case. The optional section underneath it is the part that moves.

The section is optional and the developer controls it, so its coming and going says nothing about policy. It is still the only surface that pairs a price with a trial length. That makes it the most useful line if you’re working out what you pay before you cancel. Read it on the day you need it.

Who can refund you, and the two documents that disagree

Both of these are Duolingo's own, and they do not say the same thing.

The Apple row agrees with itself. The Google Play row does not. The terms, effective 8 September 2025, say that for purchases made through the Apple or Google stores “Duolingo cannot issue refunds for those purchases”. The help center invites Play subscribers to email and have a request reviewed. The reading that squares them is that reviewing a request and issuing a refund are different acts — Duolingo can read your email and then point you at Google. That reading is fair. Know it before you wait on a reply the contract says can’t end in money.

The deadline is Apple's, not Duolingo's

Apple's page, published 29 September 2026, says to cancel a trial at least 24 hours before it ends. Duolingo's terms carry a 24-hour rule too, but only in the promotion-code section, covering extended free trials redeemed with a code. For the ordinary 14-day trial the terms give no deadline at all. So the one number that decides whether a trial turns into a charge is published by the store, in a document a Duolingo subscriber has no particular reason to open.

What survives cancellation

Duolingo answers this directly, and more generously than most apps. Your streak and learning progress are not affected. Super features keep working until the end of the period already paid for. You can reactivate at any time. What does not survive is money already taken: canceling is not retroactive, and previously charged fees are not prorated to the date you cancel.

What Duolingo does better

The filing, which is usually the broken part.

• One article, organized by the question that decides the answer. Duolingo's cancellation page is split by where you subscribed, which is the split that matters, and it is titled for the job it does. Compare Rocket Money, whose store cancellation steps are filed inside an article about a mortgage benefit.
• The trap is in the third sentence. “Deleting the app and/or your account does not cancel your subscription” appears above the instructions rather than below them.
• It answers the emotional question. The streak is Duolingo's central retention mechanic, and the article says outright that canceling does not touch it. Leaving that vague would have been easy.
• It admits what it cannot do. “We cannot access the iOS App Store, nor resolve issues you are experiencing with this service” is an unflattering sentence to publish, and it saves an iPhone subscriber a wasted email.

What we could not check

We didn’t sign in to Duolingo. Three things on this page come from documents rather than screens: the in-app cancellation flow itself, the web Settings flow, and which of Apple's “Super Duolingo” prices a new subscriber is offered today. Apple's ten-item list is capped at ten, so it may be a sample of a longer set.

How to check any of this yourself

Find the charge before you go looking for the button. A bank or card statement naming Apple or Google tells you which list to open, and that one fact decides every other step. Then expand the In-App Purchases row near the bottom of an App Store listing; the badge at the top tells you nothing. Then scroll past the description on a Play listing to see whether the optional items-and-offers section is filled in. On this app it was there, gone and back within ten days, and gone again on 3 November 2026.