What Duolingo costs, according to Duolingo

Disclosure first, because it should colour everything after it: I sell a paid language app. One honest paragraph about it sits near the end, and I've kept it out of the rest.

On 21 September 2026 I opened Duolingo's US App Store listing and read the description text. Verbatim: "If you like Duolingo, try Super Duolingo for 14 days free!" It goes on to promise "Unlimited Energy & Monthly Streak Repair."

Then I opened duolingo.com/super in a browser, the same morning. The button says "START MY 1 WEEK FREE." The feature list says Unlimited Hearts. Energy appears nowhere on it.

Two pages Duolingo owns. One trial length each, 7 days apart. Two different names for the thing the free tier runs out of.

I can't tell you which is right, and that's the finding. Every page ranking for this question states a trial length flatly, and a buyer has no way to know that the company contradicts itself on it.

Two Duolingo pages, one morning, two answers

The hearts-versus-energy split matters more than it looks, because it's the thing the subscription removes.

Energy was the newer mechanic, and it bites harder: it drains on correct answers too, where hearts only came off when you got something wrong. A page telling you the paid tier lifts "hearts" is describing a cheaper problem than a page telling you it lifts "energy."

Duolingo's marketing site currently says hearts. Its App Store copy currently says energy. My honest read is that the rollout moved and one surface lagged, but I don't know which direction, and I'm not going to guess in a paragraph someone might spend $100 on.

So the practical instruction is annoying and correct: whatever the trial says when you tap the button is the one that binds you. Screenshot it. The number in this post, and in every other post, is a number somebody read on a day that isn't today.

The only price figures I can show you

Duolingo does not publish a subscription price on the open web. I fetched duolingo.com/super and duolingo.com/pricing directly and got about 11KB of JavaScript shell each, with no price string in the HTML at all. The help centre publishes no figure either, across the Super, Max and Family Plan articles.

What exists is Apple's In-App Purchases panel. Five entries named "Super Duolingo," read 21 September 2026: $9.99, $12.99, $83.99, $95.99 and $119.99.

Apple attaches no billing term to any of them. Not one says per month or per year.

You can build a plausible story out of five numbers. Two that look monthly, two that look like an individual year, one that looks like a family year. It's probably roughly that.

Probably. I'm not printing a mapping I can't source, because printing unsourced mappings is precisely what has gone wrong on this search result. The same panel also lists standalone gem packs, a separate purchase from the subscription entirely.

Here's what that costs the reader. One page ranking today sells Super at "$12.99/month" and a "14-day free trial." Another gives the annual as "$83.99 – $95.99/year," a $12 spread, and is stamped May 2026 under a headline announcing September 2026. A third is stamped 28 May 2026 and still prices the US at $12.99 a month.

They're not lying. They're each reading the same unlabelled Apple panel, on different days, and picking a different line off it.

One of them does something none of the others manage, and it deserves credit: it prices 8 markets in local currency, which is the only acknowledgement anywhere that Duolingo prices regionally. I can't re-verify those figures, since the non-US App Store pages redirected on me, so I'm pointing at the idea rather than repeating the numbers.

Whether Max still exists, in the CEO's own words

The most confident claim on this search result is that Duolingo Max is being phased out, its features folded into Super. A reader who believes it will assume Max is a dying tier not worth buying.

Duolingo's own help centre, read 21 September 2026, sells Max as a live product. It describes Roleplay and Video Call with Lily, lists which courses support them, and gives step-by-step instructions for subscribing and for upgrading from Super. No notice of withdrawal anywhere on it.

And on the Q2 2026 earnings call in August, Luis von Ahn said: "Another possibility, truthfully, is that we may actually sunset Max." At a Citi conference afterwards he put it flatter still: "We're not entirely sure what we're going to do with Max. It's still there. People are still paying for it, but we're not entirely sure."

A maybe, from the CEO, reported elsewhere as a decision. What he did commit to is moving Video Call to all Super subscribers, which is the actual buying-relevant fact: the headline Max feature is coming down a tier.

So if Max's AI features are the reason you were going to pay more, wait. That's a judgement rather than a price, and it's the one piece of advice on this page I'd stand behind six months from now.

What the money actually removes

Every competing page answers "is it worth it" with a feature list. No ads, unlimited hearts or energy, offline lessons. All real, and all descriptions of friction being taken away.

Ask the sharper question. Does paying change what you learn?

No, and Duolingo has never claimed it does. The paid tier removes interruptions. It doesn't alter what a lesson contains, how items get chosen, or when they come back around.

You're buying the absence of advertising, which is a perfectly good thing to buy.

Which gives you a real decision rule. If ads and running out of hearts are genuinely stopping you finishing sessions you'd otherwise finish, the subscription pays for itself the first week. If you open the app twice a week and drift, removing ads changes nothing, because ads were never what stopped you.

Credit where it's due, and I'd rather say this plainly than dress a competitor's price up as a scandal. The free tier is a real full course, not a demo. Duolingo published a genuine spaced repetition scheduler, half-life regression, at ACL in 2016 and open-sourced it.

Since 22 April 2026 its Spanish course claims content through CEFR B2, so the old "Duolingo only gets you to A2" line is out of date. And the habit loop works on people that other methods lose entirely.

My disagreements are elsewhere: what a streak proves, and what a course can't cover once you're past the beginning. A page that pretends the product is bad hasn't earned the right to be believed about its price.

How to buy it without getting stung

Two mechanics are worth knowing before you tap, both from Apple rather than Duolingo, since Apple is who bills you.

Cancel a trial at least 24 hours before it ends, in Apple's words. Cancelling early doesn't cut you off early: you keep the remaining days and simply aren't charged, so cancelling straight after signing up is the sensible default.

And cancelling happens in Settings, not inside Duolingo. Tap your name, then Subscriptions, then the subscription, then Cancel Subscription. People miss that and get billed by a product they thought they'd left.

The thing I could not verify, and won't infer: what happens to family plan members when the organiser cancels. No Duolingo page I could reach states it. Ask support before you organise a plan around 5 other people.

Now the promised paragraph. I build Verbamor, an iOS app that turns vocabulary from your own tutor lessons into fill-in-the-blank cards with audio, scheduled by FSRS, in 5 languages. It's $19.99 a month or $129.99 a year, with a 7-day trial on the annual plan and no free tier. Both are US prices, read off the app's own plan definitions on 21 September 2026; the App Store sets a different number in other countries.

Those figures sit on a page you can read without logging in, which is the only comparison I'll draw: Duolingo's don't, and that's why you had to search for this.

The two barely overlap. Duolingo teaches a language from zero. Mine only holds words somebody already taught you, and it won't teach you your first thousand.

So if you're starting Spanish from nothing, Super Duolingo is a better buy than what I sell, and the free tier is a better buy than either. Anki is free on desktop and Android and runs a serious scheduler if you'll build your own cards. The honest audience for a paid review app is narrower than any page on this query admits, mine included.

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Sources

Every load-bearing claim Verbamor makes is traced to its paper on the research page.