How much is Super Duolingo? The six App Store prices

Disclosure before anything else, because it changes how you should read the rest: I make a paid language app. It costs money and competes for the same budget. I'll come back to that once, near the end, and otherwise leave it alone.

Here's what I can prove. On 21 September 2026 I pulled Duolingo's US App Store listing and read the In-App Purchases block. Six entries are named "Super Duolingo": $9.99, $12.99, $79.99, $83.99, $95.99 and $119.99.

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

Then I fetched duolingo.com/super, duolingo.com/pricing and duolingo.com/plans the same morning. All three return about 11KB of JavaScript shell with zero price strings in the HTML.

Duolingo doesn't publish its subscription price on the open web. You have to be logged in, in the app, in your region, to see what you'll be charged.

So the honest answer to "how much is Super Duolingo" is a range: somewhere between $9.99 and $119.99 in the US, depending on term and plan. Anyone handing you a tidier number is reading the same six figures and guessing at the labels.

Apple lists six prices and never says which is monthly

The In-App Purchases panel on an App Store listing is the closest thing to a primary source that exists for an app that sells everything through Apple. It's Apple's own data, straight from the listing. Here it is, transcribed exactly, gem packs included so you can see I'm not cherry-picking:

Duolingo's In-App Purchases, US App Store, read 21 September 2026

Super Duolingo $9.99 No term stated.

Super Duolingo $12.99 No term stated.

Super Duolingo $79.99 No term stated.

Super Duolingo $83.99 No term stated.

Super Duolingo $95.99 No term stated.

Super Duolingo $119.99 No term stated.

You can reconstruct a plausible story from those six prices. Two low figures that look monthly, three mid figures that cluster around an individual year, one high figure that looks like a family year. That's probably right.

Probably. I'm not going to print a mapping I can't source, because the whole problem with Super's price online is people printing mappings they can't source.

One thing Duolingo does state in its own words, in the App Store description text: "If you like Duolingo, try Super Duolingo for 14 days free!" That settles the trial question.

It's worth settling, because two of the three price pages I checked get it wrong in different directions.

Three price guides read the same list and pick different lines

I read three other price guides on 21 September 2026. They contradict each other on both facts a buyer came for, and none of them notices.

FamilyPro says Super Duolingo is $95.99/year in the USA and the trial is "two weeks." Papora, bylined Jake Stainer and updated 28 May 2026, says $12.99/month and a 14-day trial.

DealNews says the annual is "$83.99 – $95.99/year," a $12 range, with a tilde on nearly every figure.

Look at those three annual answers next to the Apple panel. $95.99 and $83.99 are both on it. Both pages are reading the same list and picking a different line.

DealNews is the instructive failure. Its H1 (the main headline) says "How Much Is Super Duolingo in September 2026?" and its update stamp says May 11, 2026. The freshness is templated.

A page that inserts the current month into its headline while the body ages in place is telling you the month it was read, not the month it was checked.

Papora's gap is different and bigger. It prices 8 currencies and gives monthly individual plus annual family for each. That skips the individual annual price, the thing most buyers are actually billed.

FamilyPro's problem is that the page exists to sell a $9.99/year product of its own. FamilyPro slots it above the real Duolingo tiers in its own comparison table. And the page has no byline and no date, though its entire value is a current price.

Credit where it's due, though, and this genuinely surprised me: FamilyPro has the single most useful sentence across all three pages. It gives a usage threshold instead of a vibe. Don't buy under 10 minutes a day; buy at around 20. That's a real decision rule and the other two don't attempt one.

At 20 minutes a day, a year costs about 79 cents an hour

You don't care about the sticker. You care whether the sticker divided by your actual usage is a good trade.

So take the range honestly. At the low end of the annual-looking figures on Apple's list, $79.99 is about $6.67 a month. At the high end for an individual, $95.99 is about $8.

A monthly plan at $12.99 costs roughly $156 across a year. So paying by the year saves you somewhere around $60 to $76 if you last the year.

Lasting the year is the whole decision. A monthly subscription you cancel in week 6 costs $26. An annual you abandon in week 6 costs the full year.

If you're weighing the tier above Super, is Duolingo Max worth it covers what the step up buys.

Now divide by hours. Say $95.99 and 20 minutes a day, every day. That's about 122 hours in a year, so roughly 79 cents an hour.

At 10 minutes a day it's about $1.58 an hour. At the 3-days-a-week pace most people actually hit, call it 52 hours, and you're near $1.85.

Every one of those hourly figures is cheap against an hour of tutoring. Duolingo isn't expensive, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress up a competitor's price as a problem.

The family plan is where the arithmetic gets genuinely interesting. It's also the one case where I'll do division on a number whose label I'm inferring.

Take $119.99 as the family year and $95.99 as the individual year. Two people paying individually is $191.98, so the family plan wins at two. It's already cheaper before you find a third person.

Winning at two is worth knowing, because the family plan is usually pitched at households of 5 or 6. If you have one other person in the house who opens the app, you're overpaying by splitting.

Is Super Duolingo worth paying for?

This page is about Super's price list. For what the free tier gives you, the trial and Max, see what Duolingo costs.

Super Duolingo is worth it if ads and energy limits are actually stopping you from finishing sessions. Every price page I read answers the question with a feature list instead: no ads, unlimited energy, offline lessons.

Those are real, and they're all descriptions of friction being removed.

Ask the sharper version instead. Does paying make you learn faster?

My read, and I'll own it as a read: paying doesn't make you learn faster, and Duolingo has never claimed it does. The paid tier removes interruptions. It doesn't change what a lesson is, how items are selected, or when they come back.

You're buying convenience and the absence of advertising, which is a fine thing to buy. The method stays the same.

So the threshold FamilyPro stumbled onto is the right frame. If energy limits and ads are actually stopping you from finishing sessions you'd otherwise finish, the subscription pays for itself immediately.

If you open the app twice a week and drift off, removing ads changes nothing, because ads weren't what stopped you.

And Duolingo's method underneath is better than its reputation. Duolingo published a real spaced repetition scheduler, half-life regression, at ACL in 2016, open-sourced.

The old line that Duolingo only gets you to A2 (elementary) is out of date too. Since 22 April 2026 it says its Spanish course teaches through CEFR B2, upper intermediate on the European scale, across 9 courses.

I have plenty of disagreements with Duolingo, and its streak mechanics oversell what a streak proves. But a page that pretends the product is bad hasn't earned the right to be believed about the price.

Cancelling, refunds and the trial all run through Apple

All three price guides skip how you get out, so here it is from Apple's own support pages, read the same day.

Cancelling. Apple's instructions, verbatim on the iPhone steps: "In Settings, tap your name. Tap Subscriptions. Tap the subscription. Tap Cancel Subscription." If there's no Cancel button or you see red expiration text, it's already cancelled. Cancelling in the app store rather than inside Duolingo is the part people miss.

The trial. Same page: "If you signed up for a trial subscription and you don't want to renew it, cancel it at least 24 hours before the trial ends." Cancelling on day 3 of 14 doesn't cut you off on day 3.

You keep the remaining days and simply aren't charged, which makes cancelling immediately after signing up the sensible default.

Refunds. Refunds go through Apple, never Duolingo. Apple's page: sign in to reportaproblem.apple.com, choose "I'd like to," then "Request a refund." Pick a reason and the item, and "Wait 24 to 48 hours for an update on your request." Eligibility is Apple's call.

Tax. The App Store figures above are what Apple displays in the US, where tax handling varies by state. So the charge on your card can differ from the number on the listing. I'm flagging it without quoting a rate, since I can't verify one that holds everywhere.

Here's the one exit question I couldn't answer. What happens to a family plan when the organiser cancels? Specifically, do members keep access to the end of the paid period? No Duolingo page I could reach says, and I'm not going to infer it.

Ask Duolingo support before you organise a plan for 5 people.

Now the promised paragraph about my own stake. I build Verbamor, an iOS app that turns vocabulary from your own lessons and conversations into audio cards where you supply the missing word. FSRS, an open-source algorithm that predicts when you're about to forget each card, schedules them. Five languages.

There's no free tier: you pay $19.99 monthly or $129.99 yearly, and only the yearly plan starts with a 7-day trial. Both are US prices, read from Verbamor's own plan setup on 21 September 2026; the App Store sets a different number in other countries.

Those figures sit on a page anyone can read without logging in. That's the only comparison I'll draw here: Duolingo's don't.

Duolingo and Verbamor barely overlap anyway. Duolingo teaches you a language from zero. Beyond its Essentials deck of roughly 650 common words, mine holds onto words somebody already taught you, and it has no course to take you from zero.

If you're starting Spanish from nothing and want to spend under $100 this year, Super Duolingo is a better buy than what I sell. The free tier is a better buy than both.

Anki costs nothing on desktop or Android and runs a serious scheduler if you'll build your own cards. The honest audience for a paid app is narrower than any of these pages admits.

---

Sources