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Overview

  • Duolingo drove multipleuser retentionmetrics to record highs in Q2 2026, as the company continues to optimize the free user experience to boost engagement, CEO Luis von Ahn said on last week's Q2 2026 earnings call.
  • Daily active users (DAU) grew beyond expectations, up 23% year-over-year to 58.7 million, according to theshareholder letter. Paid subscriptions grew 17% year-over-year to 12.7 million.
  • "We do expect higher DAU to lead to higher revenue," von Ahn said, "but it takes some time."

Deep Dive

Duolingo is continuing its plan to remove friction from the free subscription and improve the overall learning experience to build sustainable growth.

Revenue grew 18% year-over-year to $298.5 million, according to the shareholder letter. Total bookings grew 8% year-over-year to $289.1 million, and the company expects full-year bookings to grow 11% year-over-year, von Ahn said.

"We said at the beginning of the year that we would stay in this range on revenue, and we will continue to do so," von Ahn said. "Basically, bookings are growing about 11% year-over-year, and the rest of our energy is going into improving DAU and teaching quality."

Providing a better experience across all tiers will boost engagement, while free trials will drive more users to its premium paid model.

"Historically, some of our monetization was through adding friction to the free product experience, which worked against user growth," von Ahn said.

Rather than pushing users to paid tiers by avoiding friction in the free subscription, the language app company found longer free trials work better. So it has extended free trials from seven days to one month for most of its products, von Ahn said.

"This works because significantly more users are willing to try the trial, because it's a better deal for them," von Ahn said. "Because of that, we get more people who actually convert to paid."

While nearly all user retention metrics hit record highs, Duolingo focuses most on current user retention rate (CURR). CURR is the percentage of daily active users who return the next day.

"We're very happy that it's at an all-time high and has improved by about one percentage point over the past year, because small changes in CURR end up having a pretty big impact on DAU, because it compounds," von Ahn said.

CURR grew across all regions and all user types, von Ahn said. "The reason is simple: the product is more engaging."