An Open Letter to the Green Owl

Hi Duo,

I recently cancelled my 7 day trial of a Super Duo family plan. I received your follow up email inviting questions or comments, so here we are...

I've been using Duolingo for quite a while now (my streak is a little over 2500 days) and I certainly understand that it's a good app that can potentially help one learn the basics of a language. Using Duolingo I learnt Esperanto to a point of being able to read it reasonably well, although I still struggle to use it in any sort of real conversational way (I also joined the Australian Esperanto Federation, so that helped a bit). I've also dabbled with Portuguese, Japanese and Italian, enough to have some of the basics down for travelling, although I'm far from being able to talk in these languages enough to have a conversation.

While I like Duo, and find it useful for the basics, I can't see it ever being enough to make one conversational in a language without additional outside support. 

When I started using Duo several years ago it was quite functional, even the free version. You could make quite a bit of progress on a language without incurring a cost. But gradually you guys have introduced more and more limitations and restrictions that can only be removed by paying for it. Without being a paid subscriber the app is very much crippled if you're genuinely trying to learn a language, and I seriously doubt that someone could make much real language learning progress without paying now. 

Let me be clear, I wouldn't be opposed to paying to use it if I thought it was priced right. But it's simply too expensive for an app that is never likely to make one fluent in a language. I think you need to review your pricing structure to make it more attractive to language learners, or at least improve the experience for those on the free tier. Because at the moment, there is very little incentive for someone to keep using the app without paying. In all likelihood their progress will be slow and ineffective, and that's hardly motivational. 

Maybe that's your strategy; make the free tier unappealing enough that it forces the few serious people to subscribe. But I can't help wondering how many people you lose who might be prepared to pay to use it,  but just less than what you're asking. 

It seems clear that your current business model is far more about extracting subscription fees from a smaller number of users, rather than a mission of encouraging the masses to find joy in learning a language. And that's disappointing, because that's certainly how it felt in the beginning.