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 overlap is real, so it comes first. Theirs teaches you a language; ours deals nine trivia cards a day and pays you coins for them, at nothing like Duolingo’s size. 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 — and that part of its reputation is earned. What is left to ask is what the free tier leaves out, and what the paid tier costs. The first is answered by Duolingo in unusual detail. The second is answered on two surfaces out of five, and neither is a page Duolingo writes for itself.
What the free tier includes
Duolingo answers this itself, and clearly. 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 content is free. What Duolingo sells is the experience around it: fewer interruptions, no ceiling on mistakes, and the practice tools that let you go back over what you got wrong.
The price is on the stores, not on Duolingo's page
We went looking for the price of Super Duolingo on every official surface we could reach. There are five. Two print a figure, and both belong to the app stores.
- The Google Play listing. Below the description there is an optional section headed In-app items and offers — the same slot that is called In-game items and offers on a game, which is how we came to Crossy Road’s fourteen prices. On Duolingo it reads “Super Duolingo — 14-day trial, then $83.99/year”, read on 24 September 2026. The section is optional and it moves: it was there on 14 September, absent under both headings on 22 September, and back two days later. The figure is one plan out of the three Duolingo advertises, and the only price on any surface that comes with a plan name and a billing period.
The other four surfaces, read again on 24 September 2026, carry less:
- 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 92,292 characters of HTML either — we checked the source too, because a price in a collapsed element would still count as published.
- The App Store listing. There is no promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel. The Information row reading “In-App Purchases: Yes” has a chevron, and expanding it lists Super Duolingo at $9.99, $12.99, $83.99, $95.99 and $119.99 twice, with no billing period on any. The Sweatcoin page explains what that list does and does not tell you.
- The Google Play listing itself, away from that one section. An In-app purchases badge with no figure, and a description that names no amount.
- The store descriptions. Apple’s carries the full auto-renewal disclosure — charged for renewal within 24 hours before the end of the current period, auto-renewal switchable off in your settings — and does not say what the amount is. Google Play’s carries no renewal disclosure at all.
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 rest of the price list appears when you are signed in and buying. It matters anyway, as it did for Rocket Money: two of the three tiers Duolingo advertises are still numbers you can only get after installing, and the published figures are on the stores’ pages, not Duolingo’s.
Other companies do it differently. ChatGPT prints four plan prices in large type on a page anyone can read without an account. It then describes what its free tier includes with the word “Limited” seven times and no number once, the mirror image of what Duolingo does here. The two halves of “is it free” are independent, and a company can be forthcoming about either one without being forthcoming about the other.
Seven days or fourteen, and Duolingo says both
This part can cost you money. 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” and repeats “START MY 1 WEEK FREE” on every button. It 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.
Nothing either surface publishes resolves this. 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 looks like ordinary corporate untidiness. Either way, the advice holds: assume seven days, and put your own reminder in for day five. Being wrong that way costs nothing; the other way, it costs a charge you did not plan for. The one place that pairs an amount with a plan length (Google Play’s In-app items and offers section, at $83.99 a year) is also a surface saying the trial runs fourteen days, the longer of the two figures.
Hearts, or Energy, depending which store you read
The mechanic that sells Super is the first row 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 free-tier timer, turning waiting into a purchase, and Duolingo discloses it in the first row of its 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 could not read. 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 have left the gap open instead of filling it from a blog post we cannot check. It is the most useful thing missing from this page, and it goes in when the source can be read.
The price that is itemized
The money cost is the one nobody prints and the data cost is published in detail. Duolingo’s declarations are among the heaviest we have 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. It lists eleven linked to your identity, adding financial info, contacts and search history. For scale, the heaviest game we have read 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. Two things run in Duolingo’s favor here: 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
It is barely a contest.
- It is one of the most successful education apps ever built. 4.7 stars across 5.5 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 the whole course. Duolingo gives away the thing people came for and sells the comfort around it. Most subscription apps are less generous, and it is why the answer to the title is 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 we are in no position to criticize this 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 work on any app. Read the company’s own pricing page first and search it for a currency symbol instead of skimming, 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 below the description on Google Play, where the section is headed In-app items and offers on an app and In-game items and offers on a game. An absence in either one is evidence of nothing. On Duolingo the Play section was absent on one visit and present two days later.
Third, the habit that found the trial mismatch: 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. We do the same with reward apps, where the figure a company will not divide is usually printed somewhere it never expected anyone to look.