LingoDeer vs Duolingo: the prices nobody checked

I have not used either app, and this page is built entirely from what LingoDeer and Duolingo publish themselves. Every figure below was read on 21 September 2026 and is quoted with that date. I also sell a language app, which you should weigh while reading. The trade is that you can click each claim and check it yourself, which is more than the pages above me offer.

The answer, by who you are

Four lines. Stop at the one that describes you.

You are starting Japanese, Korean or Chinese. LingoDeer. Its free tier opens every course with the full Alphabet section, and a writing system is the wall people hit in week one.

You have never made it past week 2 of anything. Duolingo, free, today. Its habit machinery is the best shipped in this category, and fixing the showing-up problem costs you nothing.

You want grammar explained rather than inferred. LingoDeer, which sells itself on a "grammar-based curriculum" and puts Learning Tips inside its Premium tier.

You want to hold a conversation this year. Neither, on its own. Both are recognition-and-tap apps, and I get into why in the section below that no competing page has.

What they cost, captured 21 September 2026

Here is the actual problem with this search. Four pages ranking for it today quote LingoDeer at $11.99 a month, $14.99 a month, $15 a month and $150.99 a year. That is a spread of more than 2x on the single fact the query exists to settle.

So, LingoDeer's own pricing page, read on 21 September 2026. Monthly US$14.99. Quarterly US$39.99. Annually US$95.99, struck through from US$159.99 and badged "40% OFF". A 3-Year Premium at US$189.99, down from US$479.99. A 6-Year Premium at US$239.99, down from US$969.99 and labelled "Limited offer".

Now the same company, same day, in the US App Store. Apple lists "Multilingual Pass - Monthly $14.99", "Multilingual Pass (Annual) $95.99", "Multilingual Pass - Quarterly $34.99", "Multilingual Pass - 6 Months $83.99", and two items named "Multilingual Pass - Lifetime" at $159.99 and $119.99.

Read those two lists against each other. The monthly and annual agree. The quarterly does not: $39.99 on the website, $34.99 in the app. And the app sells a 6-month plan the website does not show at all.

LingoDeer explains half of this itself, in an article about its long-term plans: app stores "charge commissions and impose pricing limitations", so the multi-year plans live on the website where the company keeps more of the money. That is a fair reason, honestly stated. It also means anyone quoting you one LingoDeer price is quoting one storefront and probably does not know it.

Duolingo is worse to pin down, and I am going to refuse rather than guess. Its US App Store listing on 21 September 2026 showed Super Duolingo at $9.99, $12.99, $83.99, $95.99 and $119.99. Apple attaches no billing term to any of them. There is no honest way to tell you which one is the month, so I won't. The same listing offers "Super Duolingo for 14 days free".

Which makes the page currently ranking third for this search a problem. It prints "Duolingo premium version costs $6.99" and "LingoDeer paid version will cost you $11.99". Neither figure appears on either company's store listing today. A buyer who reads two of these pages ends up trusting none of them, and that is the honest state of this search result.

Two things worth knowing before you click either store. LingoDeer's annual price has carried a strike-through discount every time I have looked, so the US$159.99 reference rate is not the transacted price. And any figure you see on a "per month" basis for an annual plan is arithmetic somebody did, not a charge anybody makes.

What you get without paying

Both have a genuine free tier, and they are different shapes.

LingoDeer publishes its boundary with unusual precision. Free for every course: "everything in Alphabet", "everything in Unit One" including its Review section, "Test Outs for all units in the main course", "everything in the Travel Phrasebook", and the first lesson of the Beginner I and Beginner II units in Fluent. Everything past that needs Premium, and so do "Offline Learning and Cross-Device Synchronization".

That Alphabet line is the one that matters. If you are starting Korean or Japanese, the writing system is the part that makes people quit in week one, and LingoDeer gives it to you free in every course.

There is also a 7-day free trial, and LingoDeer states two limits on it that reviews skip: "The trial is linked to the yearly subscription option", and "the 7-day free trial is currently only available on the app". So the trial and the discounted multi-year plans live on opposite storefronts.

Duolingo's free tier is the full core course, ad-supported, metered by Energy. You spend Energy on lessons and earn it back by answering correctly, watching an ad or spending gems. Super's App Store pitch is "no ads" plus Unlimited Energy, which tells you what free costs: your session ends when the app decides rather than when you do. Duolingo does not publish the starting Energy amount, so a page quoting you a number invented it.

One operational fact only one competing page bothers with, and it is worth keeping. Refunds. LingoDeer's own policy is that it "does not offer refunds for partially used periods or accidental renewals", with a 7-day money-back guarantee on "certain membership plans" bought through its website, covering the Annual, 3-Year and 6-Year plans, "one 7-day money-back request per user". Buy inside the app and you are in Apple's refund process instead. Know which till you are standing at before you pay for six years of anything.

The lifetime plan question

Several pages still tell you LingoDeer sells a lifetime plan for $160, or $299, depending which page you read. LingoDeer has published an article saying it stopped.

Its reasoning is unusually candid for a company page: "we have always been aware that selling Lifetime memberships is not a healthy or sustainable business model in the long term", and it "was a necessary choice to ensure the survival and growth of our project". Existing lifetime holders keep "full Lifetime access to all Premium-tier courses and features", with a caveat that "some AI-powered features introduced in later expansions may follow a different access model".

The 3-Year and 6-Year plans replaced it, both "One-time payment, no auto-renewal", both website-only.

Meanwhile Apple's listing for the same app still showed two items called "Multilingual Pass - Lifetime" on the day I looked. I cannot tell you from outside whether those are buyable or stale store furniture, and I am not going to pretend to know.

Here is the buyer's question underneath all of this, and it applies to the 6-year plan more than it ever did to lifetime. You are handing a private company $239.99 against six years of its continued existence, in a category where products get shut down. Duolingo killed TinyCards in 2020 and plenty of comparison pages still recommend it. Paying by the year costs more per year and buys you the option to walk.

What neither app does

Every page comparing these two compares them only to each other, so you finish reading convinced one of them is the answer. Here is the axis they share.

Both put the target sentence on the screen before you produce it. Duolingo describes its own speaking exercises plainly: they "prompt you to repeat words, translate sentences out loud, or take part in bite-sized dialogues", plus a microphone option on many writing exercises. LingoDeer's Premium description lists Speaking among its Redo Lesson exercises, alongside Listening, Spelling and Handwriting.

In both cases your mouth does the work and your memory sits it out.

That distinction has a literature behind it. Kang, Gollan and Pashler (2013) taught learners Hebrew nouns two ways: one group heard each word and repeated it, the other tried to produce it from memory before hearing it. Two days later the retrieval group had better comprehension, better production, and no loss of pronunciation quality.

Be careful how far you push that. The test was naming pictures of single words in isolation, which is a long way from finding a word mid-sentence while somebody waits. The study does not claim otherwise and neither will I.

The second thing neither does: build you a deck from the words you personally got stuck on. Both teach a fixed syllabus. LingoDeer does ship review with spaced repetition, which it calls "Memorization with SRS", and that is more than several better-known apps offer. What it reviews is what its own lessons taught you, in its own order.

So if you are already paying a tutor, the words you fumbled on Tuesday cannot get into either app. That is the wrong shape for the problem, and it is the reason a course app and a lesson habit sit awkwardly together.

Side by side

Every cell traces to a company page I read on 21 September 2026.

Which one to buy

A new writing system. LingoDeer, and start with the free Alphabet section before you pay anything.

A Romance language and a daily-habit problem. Duolingo. Its April 2026 post names Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese among the nine courses that now teach through CEFR B2, so the old line about Duolingo stopping at A2 is out of date for those.

You want a grammar explanation, in words, before the exercises. LingoDeer, on the strength of its own curriculum description. Take the trial before the 6-year plan.

You already pay for lessons. Skip both. A course app teaches its own syllabus and cannot hold what your tutor corrected this week.

And the concession I mean. If you take lessons and you will type your own cards, use Anki. It is free on desktop and Android, its scheduler is excellent once you switch FSRS on, and it will hold your tutor's words better than either app here. The catch is that you build every card by hand, forever, and most people quietly stop around week 3.

That week-3 lapse is the only thing I built Verbamor for. It records your lesson, pulls the words you actually got wrong out of the transcript, and makes the cards so you don't have to. Five languages, iOS only, $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. If you don't take lessons it has nothing to work with, and one of the two apps above is the better purchase.

I will re-read both listings each quarter and change the date at the top when I do. A price with a date on it is worth something; a price without one is a rumour.

Questions people actually ask

---

Sources

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