How much is Super Duolingo? Nobody can tell you, including Duolingo

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 them. 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 does not 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.

The six numbers Apple actually lists

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, not a blog's summary. 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. 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 this search result 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, and it's worth settling, because two of the three pages ranking for this query get it wrong in different directions.

Why the top three results disagree

I read all three 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 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, which 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, slotted above the real Duolingo tiers in its own comparison table, with no byline and no date on a page whose 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.

The arithmetic you're really doing

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.

That "if" 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.

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 is cheap against an hour of tutoring. Duolingo is not 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, and it's 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.

That's 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 it worth it, as a mechanism question

Every page on this query answers "is it worth it" with a feature list. 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: no, 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. You're not buying a different method.

Which means 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 the 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 is out of date too: since 22 April 2026 it says its Spanish course teaches through CEFR B2 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.

The exits nobody covers

All three ranking pages 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. These 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 rather than quoting a rate, since I can't verify one that holds everywhere.

Here's the one I couldn't answer. What happens to a family plan when the organiser cancels, specifically whether members keep access to the end of the paid period, isn't stated on any Duolingo page I could reach, 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 tutor lessons into fill-in-the-blank cards with audio, scheduled by FSRS. Five 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 anyone can read without logging in, which is the only comparison I'll draw here: Duolingo's don't, and that's why you had to search for this.

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

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, and the free tier is a better buy than both. 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 app is narrower than any of these pages admits.

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Sources

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