Where we stand, before anything else. We build Daily: Learn and Earn, which the App Store files under Education, the same category Duolingo tops. That is a real overlap and it belongs in the first paragraph rather than a footnote, even though the two apps are not remotely the same size or the same idea: theirs teaches you a language, ours deals nine trivia cards a day and pays you coins for them. We take no referral fee from Duolingo, there is no affiliate link on this page, and there is a section near the bottom on what it does better than anything we make.
Yes. Duolingo is free, permanently, and the whole course library is included — that part of its reputation is earned and this page is not going to spend a thousand words qualifying it. The interesting question is the one underneath: what the free tier leaves out, and what the paid tier costs. The first is answered by Duolingo in unusual detail. The second is not answered anywhere we could find.
What the free tier actually includes
Duolingo answers this itself, and clearly, which is worth saying before the criticism starts. Its Super Duolingo page carries a three-column comparison — Free, Super, Super Family — with six rows and a check or a cross in each. The Free column has one check and five crosses.
- Learning content — checked. The courses are free, all of them.
- Unlimited Hearts — crossed.
- Skills practice — crossed.
- Mistakes review — crossed.
- Free challenge entry — crossed.
- No ads — crossed.
That is a fair and legible answer to “is it free”, and more than most subscription apps put on one screen. The honest reading is that the content is free and the experience is the product being sold: fewer interruptions, no ceiling on mistakes, and the practice tools that let you go back over what you got wrong.
The number that is not on any of it
We went looking for the price of Super Duolingo on every official surface we could reach on 7 September 2026. There are four, and none of them has one.
- Duolingo’s own Super page. Three tiers, six features, a headline reading “no commitment. cancel anytime.” and buttons reading “START MY 1 WEEK FREE”. There is no dollar amount in the visible text, and none in the page’s 83,387 characters of HTML either — we checked the source rather than trusting our eyes, because a price hidden in a collapsed element would still count as published.
- The App Store listing. The Information row reads “In-App Purchases: Yes”, and there is no promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel — which is the one place Apple will print a price, where a developer has configured one. Duolingo has not.
- The Google Play listing. An In-app purchases badge and no figure, and no In-game items and offers section, which is Play’s equivalent slot and the one we found filled in on Crossy Road with fourteen prices.
- The store descriptions. Both carry the full auto-renewal disclosure — charged to your account within 24 hours before the end of the current period, auto-renewal switchable off in your settings — and neither says what the amount is.
None of that breaks a rule. Neither store requires a price and no law says a company must put one on its marketing page; the price appears when you are signed in and buying. It is worth noting anyway, for the same reason it was worth noting about Rocket Money: the number a reader most wants before installing is the one they can only get after installing.
Seven days or fourteen, and Duolingo says both
This is the part with a consequence. The free trial is described twice, by Duolingo, in two different lengths.
Both store descriptions say, in identical words: “If you like Duolingo, try Super Duolingo for 14 days free!” Duolingo’s own Super page says “Try 1 week free”, repeats “START MY 1 WEEK FREE” on every button, and then prints a three-step timeline that is unambiguous about the ending: Today, unlock full access; Day 5, get reminded the trial is about to end; Day 7, your account is charged, cancel anytime 24 hours before.
We are not going to resolve this, because nothing either surface publishes would. The obvious reading is that the trial length varies — by promotion, by platform, or by whether you subscribe through Apple, Google or the website — and that the store descriptions and the marketing page were written for different offers and not reconciled. That is ordinary corporate untidiness rather than a trick. But the practical advice is the same either way: assume seven days, and put your own reminder in for day five. The cost of being wrong in that direction is nothing. The cost of being wrong in the other direction is a charge you did not plan for, at an amount none of these pages will tell you in advance.
Hearts, or Energy, depending which store you read
The mechanic doing the actual selling is the one at the top of the crossed-out list. Hearts are the free tier’s limit on mistakes: make too many in a sitting and you stop, until they refill or you pay. It is the classic shape of a free tier — a timer that converts waiting into a purchase — and it is entirely disclosed, in that Unlimited Hearts is the first row of Duolingo’s own comparison.
One thing to know before you go looking for it in the app. Apple’s listing describes the perk as “Unlimited Energy” while Google Play’s listing and the website both call it “Unlimited Hearts” — in sentences that are otherwise word for word identical. Two names for one feature across the same company’s three surfaces.
What we did not read, and are therefore not telling you. How many hearts a free account gets, how fast they refill, and what a refill costs are all in Duolingo’s support documentation, which was not reachable to us when this page was written. We would rather leave the hole visible than fill it from a blog post we cannot check. It is the single most useful thing missing from this page and it will be added when the source can be read.
The price that is itemized
As on every page in this format, the money cost is the one nobody prints and the data cost is published in detail. Duolingo’s declarations are among the heaviest this site has recorded.
Apple’s App Privacy panel lists eight categories used to track you across other companies’ apps and websites — purchases, location, contact info, user content, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data — and eleven linked to your identity, adding financial info, contacts and search history. For scale, the heaviest game we have read on this site declared six tracked categories.
Google Play’s data safety page names app activity, device or other IDs and app performance data as shared with other companies, and a longer collection list including contacts, purchase history, in-app messages, voice or sound recordings, name, email address, user IDs and phone number. The audio entry is what a speaking exercise needs, which is the answer rather than the objection. Two things run in Duolingo’s favor here and are worth stating plainly: the data is encrypted in transit, and the developer provides a way to request that your data be deleted — which several free games we have read do not.
What Duolingo does better than anything we make
This section is compulsory on every page in this format so that it cannot be dropped when it is unflattering, and here it is barely a contest.
- It is one of the most successful education apps ever built. 4.7 stars across 5.4 million App Store ratings and 4.7 across 49.1 million Google Play reviews, 500 million-plus downloads, Editors’ Choice on both stores, and number one on the App Store’s Education chart and Play’s top free education chart. Daily: Learn and Earn is a trivia app with no ratings worth quoting.
- The free tier is genuinely the whole course. Duolingo gives away the thing people came for and sells the comfort around it. That is a more generous shape than most subscription apps manage, and it is why the answer to the question in the title is a plain yes.
- It publishes a real comparison table. Six rows, three columns, checks and crosses. Our own app pages did not carry the arithmetic of what they pay until September 2026, so this is not a criticism we have earned the right to make loudly.
- 40-plus courses, 33 listed languages, and a deletion route. Ours is English only, and the data-deletion request path is a thing Duolingo offers that plenty of much smaller apps do not.
How to check any of this yourself
Three habits, and they are the same three that work on every app in this format. Read the company’s own pricing page first and search it for a currency symbol rather than skimming it, because a page can look like a price list without containing a price. Then check both store listings for the optional price slots — just above App Privacy on Apple, and In-game items and offers below the description on Google Play — remembering that an absence in either one is evidence of nothing.
Third, and this is the one that found the useful thing here: when a company describes the same offer on more than one surface, read all of them and compare the numbers. Fourteen days and one week are both Duolingo’s own statements about the same trial, and the only way to notice is to put the store listing and the marketing page side by side. That is the cost-side version of the rule the rest of this site uses on reward apps, where the figure a company will not divide usually turns out to be printed somewhere it never expected anyone to look.