Duolingo’s 2026 Strategy: The Road to 100 Million DAUs 

It took Duolingo 13 years to get 50 million DAUs. CEO Luis von Ahn wants to double it in three years.

For years, von Ahn had a plan that sustained and monetized users: make the app more fun, engaging, and effective, attract more users, and convert them into subscribers. But by 2025, DAU growth was declining, which we’d been tracking at Class Central.

In Duolingo’s Q4 2025 earnings call, von Ahn finally acknowledged this. Now, he has a three-part plan to reach 100 million DAUs, but it comes with a short-term compromise and some gaps.

Solution 1: Teaching More

Duolingo’s DAU growth dropped from 51% in 2024 to 30% in 2025. To reverse this, von Ahn’s first move is improving teaching quality: deeper language and non-language courses, and new features for free and paid users.

Test Proficiency

Duolingo’s proficiency scoring system, the Duolingo Score, only went up to B1 or B2 on the CEFR scale (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) for some languages.

Now, all nine major language courses, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese, which cover over 90% of DAUs, will go up to Score 129, a high B2 level, where you can handle most everyday and professional situations in the language.

Video Call Feature for Super Subscribers

There are 10 times as many Super subscribers as Max, Duolingo’s most premium tier, powered by GPT-4 APIs. Last year, these API costs fell, so von Ahn doesn’t see the point in offering it only to Max subscribers. It will be available for Super subscribers too.

Through A/B testing, the company will monitor whether an increase in Super subscribers offsets a drop in Max bookings.

New Features

Three out of four Duolingo learners are free users, and Duolingo wants to invest in AI to offer more features to them.

By mid-2026, it will be introducing Speaking Adventures, which will have scenario-based spoken tasks (“go buy a sandwich and give it to that person”) available to free and paid users.

It is also launching Focus Mode, which will block other apps until you complete your Duolingo lesson. The aim is to reduce distractions and focus on your Duolingo goals.

Solution 2: A (Semi) “Frictionless” Free Experience

Learners with months and years of streaks often complained about Duolingo stripping away crucial features from the free version, adding multiple ads, and recently, introducing Energy to create friction for monetization. Now, the company is trying to build a frictionless experience.

The less friction that there is in the free user experience, the more users we have. We have seen this over the last 15 years. Whenever we remove friction from the free user experience, the AUs grow. – Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn

In January 2026, Duolingo made Explain My Answer free for everyone again. The feature was initially free before being moved behind the Max paywall. This was also a GPT-powered feature, and cost Duolingo the least among other features like Video Call and Roleplay.

I assumed Duolingo would go a step further in making learning frictionless and reducing the duration and frequency of ads. But it’s not.

Only the quality of ads will change. Instead of games that users haven’t heard of, Duolingo will have “higher quality” ads from brands such as Disney. The company is also testing ads in different languages, for instance, Spanish ads for Spanish learners.

Currently, the ad revenue only makes up ~8% of the total revenue, and von Ahn believes this would generate significantly more revenue per ad.

Solution 3: Growing Non-Language Courses

Chess is the outlier here. Launched in 2025 without App Store optimization, it already has 7 million DAUs, and von Ahn believes it might be the second-largest Chess platform. Math and Music, despite launching much earlier, had just 3 million DAUs between them a year after launch.

The company has been making rapid updates to the Chess course. Recently, it introduced player-vs-player mode on both iOS and Android, where you can play against other real Duolingo learners, not just Oscar (the Chess tutor).

Math is next: von Ahn wants it to compete with Kumon, a Math and Reading app for students, targeting parents rather than schools. Music got a $34.5M acqui-hire of NextBeat. Duolingo brought in 23 experts in game design, retention, and sound.

In my experience, the Music course got repetitive. NextBeat’s expertise in game design and retention could refine the course.

Despite these moves, von Ahn warned that 2026 will not see an improvement in Math or Music course performance. But Chess has proved that the potential in non-language courses is real.

The Gaps in Von Ahn’s Plan

The DAU Problem

100 million DAUs is ambitious for Duolingo since it took a long time to get to 50 million. In 2026, the company will only see a 20% increase in DAUs. To reach 100 million, it will need to re-accelerate growth: 26% on average in both 2027 and 2028.

After Duolingo had 10 straight quarters of acceleration in 2023, von Ahn said DAU growth would slow down naturally in Q1 2024. The most common reason for this, he explained, wasn’t competition or saturation, it was that people got busy.

Those aren’t the only reasons users quit the app…

• When Duolingo announced it was going AI-first, users rage-quit the app, enough to drag Q2 2025 DAU growth to the lower end of guidance.
• Frequent ads and the removal of the skip button pushed free users to uninstall.
• The introduction of Energy was perceived as a greedy monetization move, leading to more uninstallations.

To maintain DAUs, Duolingo will have to ensure that most of the learning is truly frictionless. And we already see some changes. Our founder, Dhawal Shah, noticed a more seamless experience when he signed up for it. The experience was “less annoying than it was a few months ago.”

But re-accelerating DAU growth isn’t the only challenge. Duolingo is also planning to move premium features to cheaper tiers, which has its own complications.

The Max Problem

Von Ahn wants to offer the Video Call feature (available in Max) to Super subscribers.

“It just kind of doesn’t make sense for us to just have it in Max when we can offer it in much cheaper packages.” – Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn

When I used Max, I did most of my video call sessions with Lily. Her responses were repetitive, she was too nonchalant, and other learners shared my sentiment. Some said she cuts calls midway if she thinks the user said something inappropriate.

Duolingo has since introduced Video Call with Falstaff, a more personalized character with varied responses. But more personalization means higher API costs. Super has 10 times as many subscribers as Max and costs half of it.

Duolingo has already warned margins will decrease 2% in Q1 2026. If Video Call with Falstaff rolls out to Super subscribers at scale, that pressure could extend through the year.

Will the company re-prioritize monetization then?

What’s the Main Goal: Users or Monetization?

Duolingo’s playing a harder game than Coursera and Udemy, whose total user growth has been declining too.

Even growing the total number of learners is getting harder across edtech. Duolingo wants to grow daily active users on top of that.

And it doesn’t look easy. The company made the Explain My Answer feature free in January 2026, but von Ahn said it hasn’t accelerated DAU growth as they expected.

To what extent can it please users, especially if the market is already reacting negatively to von Ahn’s plans?

When the company announced they were prioritizing teaching quality over short-term monetization, the stock dropped ~30%. And despite crossing  $1B in revenue, the stock was down 22% after the latest earnings call, where von Ahn presented his strategy.

On one hand, monetization moves are pushing free users away. On the other hand, not prioritizing it is disappointing the market.

Von Ahn’s answer is A/B testing. The platform will run thousands of tests to find what works. And Duolingo can afford it. It holds $1.036 billion in cash and can absorb margin pressure.

Whether the strategy works, we’ll know in 2027. For now, 2026 is for investments, not results.

The post Duolingo’s 2026 Strategy: The Road to 100 Million DAUs  appeared first on The Report by Class Central.

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