Duolingo's Subscription Revenue Rose 567% in Four Years

Ariel Ariel
1/3/25

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - What a Year!. Check out the full article for more insights.


Is your New Year's resolution to learn a new language? If so, you're not alone. That's where Duolingo, the now defacto gold standard for language learning comes in.

Duolingo's revenue shoots up every January as if it were a gym, but after it drops in February, it continues to grow.

2024 was Duolingo biggest year of revenue, and not by a little. Our App Intelligence shows users gave the green bird $678M in 2024, up 37% from 2023 and more than 560% higher than revenue in 2020.

The US accounts for a little under half of Duolingo's revenue but the total comes from all 100+ countries our App Intelligence covers.

Is Duolingo the only language elarning app?!?!?!?

Not at all! But...

I searched Explorer for the keyword "language learning," and it found more than 10,000 results. When summed up, those apps saw a little more than $440M in gross revenue in all of 2024.

All of the competitors combined made less than Duolingo in 2024. Let that sink in.

Duolingo's gamification of learning has a lot to do with its success, but it's also one of the most discoverable language learning apps on the App Store, commanding the top rank for most language-related keywords thanks to a carefully crafted ASO strategy and loooots of new ratings.

I expect to see this trend continue into 2025, but I'm curious if any competitor can get close now that AI is enabling so many opportunities for language learning, especially with voice.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #business

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