Dive Brief:
- Duolingo is confident that it can find ways to grow its subscriber base without adding more friction to its free tiers, co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said on a Q4 2025 earnings call Thursday.
- Only about 10% of the language learning app’s active monthly users pay for its services, according to von Ahn. Adding friction to the free experience has been the fastest way for Duolingo to increase monetization, but it came at the expense of daily active user growth.
- Instead of potentially disruptive monetization methods like increased ad loads or subscription upsells, Duolingo will lean into options like selling customizations for avatars, von Ahn said in a letter to shareholders.
Dive Insight:
Duolingo is making a better free user experience one of its top three priorities as it aims for 100 million daily active users by 2028, according to von Ahn.
The company’s daily active user growth fell over the course of 2025, according to the letter to shareholders. Duolingo’s year-over-year growth never fell below 40% from the second quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2025. However, growth dropped to 30% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Duolingo’s slowdown started in the second quarter of 2025, when backlash over von Ahn’s comments about AI contributed to user growth of 40% — on the low end of expectations. The company had seen 60% year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2024 as well as in the second quarter of 2023.
Despite the recent slowdown, Duolingo reached 52.7 million daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the letter to shareholders. Its revenue rose 35% year over year to $282.9 million.
Executives on the earnings call said they expect the company’s downward user growth trend to continue in the near future, leading to 20% year over year daily active user growth in 2026.
The company is investing into improving the free user experience to drive word of mouth and user growth, according to von Ahn. The adjustment will slow down Duolingo’s ability to grow its revenue, but that doesn’t mean monetization will stagnate.
“If you told me next week I needed to make $50,000 more a day, it’s actually quite easy to do,” von Ahn said on the call. “You just double the ad load or whatever it is. These other ways of monetizing are just going to take a little longer to do, but we're very confident that we're going to have some because only 10% of our active users pay us to subscribe.”
Duolingo is still bullish on AI despite last year’s backlash. While he admitted the company has “gotten in trouble for adopting AI fast,” von Ahn still believes the technology is important for the company.
“I'm more convinced than ever that the accelerating advances in AI will fundamentally change the way people learn,” he said on the call. “This creates an enormous opportunity for us. We are the most popular education app in the world by a margin, and we intend to lead this shift.”
