Duolingo (DUOL) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, at 5:30 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Chief Executive Officer — Luis von Ahn
• Chief Financial Officer — Matthew Skaruppa

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TAKEAWAYS

• Daily Active Users (DAUs) -- Daily active users exceeded 50 million in Q3 2025, with 36% year-over-year growth, stabilizing near 30% growth in September and October.
• Monthly Active Users (MAUs) -- Monthly active users reached 135 million, with management citing this scale as a driver for long-term growth initiatives.
• Bookings Guidance -- Full-year bookings forecast raised to nearly $1.2 billion for this year.
• Adjusted EBITDA Margin Guidance -- Affirmed at 29% adjusted EBITDA margin for the year, which management noted is "very, very close to our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin range," according to Matt Skaruppa.
• Strategic Investment Prioritization -- Management shifted investment focus toward long-term user growth and teaching efficacy over near-term monetization, describing this as a decision made over the "last month or two."
• Product Development -- AI-driven feature expansion and course improvements highlighted, including a planned roll-out of "guided video calls" and the extension of math content to cover all core K–12 curriculum.
• Chess Course Growth -- Chess became the fastest-growing course, already surpassing math and music by DAUs, with retention measured as "slightly higher than language learning" over the past three to four months.
• Duolingo Max Subscribers -- Max subscribers accounted for 9% of the total in Q3 2025, with Max bookings doubling year-over-year, though described as "underperforming our lofty expectations."
• China Market Performance -- China cited as Duolingo's fastest-growing country and now second-largest by DAUs, currently contributing 5%-6% of the business, with limited marketing spend due to geopolitical risk.
• Family Plan Penetration -- The family plan comprised 29% of total subscribers in Q3 2025.
• ARPU Trend -- Average revenue per user increased by a "mid-single digits" percentage each quarter this year. This increase was attributed mainly to Duolingo Max growth rather than pricing changes, as reflected in ARPU increases during 2025.

SUMMARY

Duolingo (DUOL 28.44%) management articulated a multi-year shift toward long-term user expansion, indicating a reduced emphasis on near-term monetization to capitalize on AI-driven learning opportunities in core language and select ancillary subjects.

• New content and feature launches, such as guided video calls and expanded math and chess offerings, are slated for the coming months to bolster both engagement and retention. The company maintained discipline despite a pivot in resource allocation. Asia, led by China, was identified as the fastest-growing region for user acquisition as of Q3 2025, and management indicated active testing of Duolingo Max in the Chinese market, pending regulatory approvals. Duolingo also highlighted broad product adoption, with the family plan reaching 29% penetration in Q3 2025.
• CEO von Ahn said, "the goal here is to be growing DAUs fast for a very long time," describing the strategic shift in investment allocations.
• Management emphasized that AI-related costs have declined "just without us doing anything," according to Luis von Ahn, while maintaining that profitability is preserved by keeping high-cost AI features behind premium tiers.
• CFO Skaruppa described the impact of the current investment focus on near-term bookings as "a relatively small, you know, financial impact from this kind of reprioritization," characterizing it as a "balancing act" for sustained growth.
• Retention among Max subscribers was reported as "slightly better than Super," based on renewal rates observed during Q3 2025, with Q4 cited as a key period for assessing larger cohort renewal rates.
• CEO von Ahn noted, "we're not particularly worried about" competitive risks from generative AI tools due to Duolingo's user engagement strengths and curriculum depth.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Duolingo Max: The company's highest-tier subscription, offering enhanced AI features like advanced conversational practice and video calls.
• ARPU: Average revenue per user, a key metric tracking monetization per active user.
• PVP: Player versus player; a feature enabling users to compete directly against each other within Duolingo’s chess course.
• Duolingo score 130: A proficiency benchmark equivalent to CEFR level B2, representing the language level suitable for employment in a knowledge job.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Luis von Ahn: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We had a strong Q3 with solid performance across all metrics. And we are on track for another exceptional year. More than 50 million people now use Duolingo every day. And we are guiding to nearly $1.2 billion in bookings this year with 33% growth and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 29%. Putting that all together means that we have rapidly scaled our impact while expanding profitability. And yet, we still feel early in our journey. We believe AI will fundamentally transform education, and we have line of sight to building a product that teaches better than ever before. That's what makes this such an exciting moment for Duolingo.

And now we will take your questions. We will now move to our question and answer session.

Operator: This time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button, which can be found on the bar at the bottom of your screen. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by lowering your hand. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen asking to be promoted to panelist. Please accept, wait a moment, and once you have been promoted to panelist, you'll hear your name called, and you may unmute your video and audio to ask your question. Your Zoom application may disappear momentarily, and this is expected. Your window will reappear. We're allowing analysts one relative follow-up to their main question.

We will now pause a moment for the team to gather and assemble the queue. Our first question will be coming from Bryan Smilek with JPMorgan. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Bryan Smilek: Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Luis, just to start, can you help us better understand the underlying drivers of DAU growth into 4Q engagement overall? And how close do you think you are to getting back on track in terms of marketing in the US? I know you mentioned growing impression volume. But is that starting to translate to user growth now? Or how should we think about that into the fourth quarter?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. Great question, Ryan. Thank you. So we just posted 36% year-over-year growth for Q3, and we are happy with that. There's puts and takes of how we got there. I mean, on the positive side, we have things like the Luckin partnership that we talked about in the shareholder letter, which helped us grow users in Asia quite a bit. We also had a number of product improvements that helped with retention. So that was great. On the other side, just like we said last time, we paused all the unhinged posts in our social media for a bit because we were listening to our community and trying to build brand love.

So when we don't post on Hinge, our posts were much less likely to go viral, and because of that, that did have an impact on DAU growth. The good news is that over the last few weeks, we have started the unhinged posts again in our social media accounts, and while it hasn't gotten all the way to the peak where it was, we've seen a lot of recovery. So that's really starting to show up. And we do expect that to affect DAUs positively. In terms of Q4 for DAUs, we expect some amount of deceleration from Q3. But we are pretty happy with where it has stabilized.

What I'll say is that September and October were both at around 30% year-over-year growth for DAUs. And that's comping a pretty strong quarter last year.

Bryan Smilek: Great. That's super helpful. And I guess, Luis, you also mentioned three core areas, monetization, user growth, and just teaching efficacy overall. Can you just elaborate on what's driving the decision to shift investments towards Longview? Is it the AI opportunity or how should we think about this impacting the bookings growth? I know you've obviously talked to 25% plus as your North Star, years ago. So just curious, how do we get back there over time?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. I mean, look. Like you said, and like I said in the shareholder letter, there's a huge opportunity right now. We see a huge opportunity over the next few years. Education and the way people learn are going to change fundamentally. And it's because of AI, and also because of AI, we see we have line of sight now to create an app that can teach really, really well, much better than anything that humanity has seen before. As good as a human tutor, but that is also more engaging. And if we're able to do that, you know, right now we have, I don't know, we just posted 135 million monthly active users.

If we're able to do an app that teaches just that well, way much better than we have now, we would be talking about billions of users that we have, and that's what we want to shoot for here. So this is why we are investing in the long term. And what that looks like is that we are putting more relative investment in things like teaching better, which, you know, teaching better if we teach better, what that does is that helps user growth, but there's a lag. You know, just whenever you improve your courses, users do grow, but it takes a while for that to happen.

And then user growth, there's a lag to get to monetization because people take some time to subscribe. So this is kind of a long-term thing, but we're very bullish on this, and this is why we're doing that. And the goal here is because the opportunity is so large, the goal here is to be growing DAUs fast for a very long time. Great. Thank you, Luis and Matt.

Operator: Alright. Our next question will come from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Nathaniel Jay Feather: Hey, everyone, and thanks for taking the question. You know, given the scale of the opportunity ahead that you're talking to, is the focus on greater, you know, long-term prioritization a durable shift in strategy that we should expect to continue, or would you plan to return to the current prioritization mix at some point? And then in connection with that focus, should we expect the pressure on bookings that you're seeing in Q4 to continue into next year with the durability of that shift? Thank you.

Luis von Ahn: Well okay. So it's gonna be years until we get to a point where we have enough that I think is, you know, just the best possible way to learn, you know, any major subject. So we will be investing for a while, and that's important to know. I should say, though, you know, we're not really guiding for next year, but we're very excited about a lot of the initiatives that we're gonna put out in the product for next year. We're gonna have much better video calls that are for beginners. It's something we're calling guided video calls. The app is gonna be a lot more social.

We're gonna have all the, you know, right now, the math course only has a little bit of content. In the next few months, we're gonna have all of the common core K through 12 content in the math. Our chess course is gonna have player versus player, and it's doing super well and growing really fast. We're gonna have a full revamp of our music course. And for the top nine languages that we teach, we're gonna be able to teach from zero to Duolingo score 130, which is where you can get a job in that language. So there's just a lot of things that we're very excited about.

And I don't know, Matt, if you have something to add to that.

Matt Skaruppa: Yeah. I think, Nathan, I wanna put it back in the context of kind of what we've said before. So we've talked to you all and our investors for a long time about wanting to maximize platform LTV. And what Luis is describing is a change of, you know, small proportion right now that is going to help us grow users for a long time, get users to do more lessons, learn better, spend more time on the app, and in general, be more engaged Duolingo users. And we think that if we do that, and we do that effectively, we'll both grow users for a long time, and we'll increase platform LTV for a long time.

So I think that will we're down to bookings and the financials ultimately as well. I think, you know, there's a we guided to a really strong 2025. There was a, you know, so we think that this can exist like it has strong financial performance. And this is just a balancing act that we've always done, and we're you all that we wanna make sure that at the present moment, we're balancing it so that we can grow really rapidly for a long time in the future. Very helpful. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from Wyatt Swanson with D. A. Davidson and Company. Please unmute your audio and video and ask your question.

Wyatt J. Swanson: Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. I'd love to hear a bit more about how the new chess course is progressing. I think at Duocon, you mentioned millions of daily active users. On that front, do you see any differences in or retention for users on the chess course versus your core language courses? And as it relates to that, kinda curious about your new PDP offering. Can you talk about, like, when you expect that to be fully rolled out?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. So needless to say, we're very excited about chess. It is the fastest growing course that we had. It's growing much faster than math and music, and faster than the way originally languages grew. It's true. We have millions of users. We're not saying exactly how many, but it is, you know, it's already surpassed math and music. The retention of chess users, you know, it hasn't been around for all that long. Our chess course has been around for three, four months. But so far, from what we can measure over the last three to four months is slightly higher than language learning. And so we're very happy with that.

We also, as you mentioned, we started rolling out PVP. That means player versus player. So people being able to play with other people. At the moment, 50% of users on iPhones, on iOS can see it. It's not yet on Android, but it's gonna come out on Android pretty soon. So we expect that within the next, you know, few weeks and your small few weeks slash small number of months, every person that has the Duolingo app will be able to do PVP chess. And, you know, over the next year, we just we'd expect quite a bit of growth from chess. And I'm very happy with it.

Wyatt J. Swanson: Great. Thanks. And then just one quick follow-up. What does prioritization of user growth instead of monetization look like? And how should I think about the actual changes in the app?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. I'll give you an example. That's just so okay. We've always had to make trade-offs between whenever we run an experiment, some experiments improve all metrics. Great. That's an easy call. Just launch it because it improves all metrics, and that happens. But there are times when experiments improve one metric but hurt another. I'll give you a fictitious example. If right now, free users get 25 energy units at the beginning of the day, and every exercise that they do spends one unit. If we were to do an experiment that decreases that from 25 to, say, 24, that's one fewer unit of energy per day. We know that would make us more money.

That it's just us because more people run out of energy, so more people end up wanting to pay to subscribe. However, we also know that would decrease daily active users because it would frustrate some of the users. We've always had to make decisions about, you know, different judgment calls about this. What we mean is that what we, know, the change that we are doing is that we are going to be prioritizing user growth over monetization in this type of judgment call.

So in the fictitious experiment that I just gave you, we would not launch that experiment going from 25 to 24 energy units even if it meant, you know, quite a bit of bookings gains, if it has a real hit on daily active users. That's the type of stuff that we're doing now. And, again, just to remind you that the reason we're doing this is because the opportunity ahead is so big that, you know, it's just good for us to grow fast for a long period of time.

Matt Skaruppa: There you go.

Wyatt J. Swanson: Thanks, guys.

Matt Skaruppa: Thanks, Mike.

Operator: Your next question will come from Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Ralph Edward Schackart: Great. Good evening, Luis and Matt. Luis and Matt, kinda going back to know, the line of questioning here. I guess maybe you know, question is, like, you know, why now? What signals are you seeing on the shift or maybe this you know, the same shift focus more on growth? Over near-term profitability as AI advancements you know, kind of what's prompting this. And then can you give us a sense of, you know, the duration of this, pivot or shift? Is this something that's gonna take I don't know, all through 2026? Is it more short term in nature? Anything you could add there would be great. Thank you.

Luis von Ahn: Great. As to why now, this I mean, it's a great question. The reality is that over the last couple of years, it has just become progressively clearer and clearer that we are in a unique point in time, with education in terms of how education is gonna happen in the world and also how well we can teach at Duolingo. We just see it, in our own metrics in, you know, how fast we can put out content with things like video call? Do we just see how much it is improving every month? And so that just kinda has been coming for a while.

And what has happened is that over the last month or two, I've really rallied the company towards this shift. And, really, it's like, okay. It's not like it was one day where I woke up and decided, oh, let's do that. It's just, you know, we really rallied the company to say, look, opportunity is huge for us. Let's prioritize make sure that we can grow for a long period of time and also making, an app that can teach really better than anything that we've seen before.

Matt Skaruppa: As to how long this is going to take, this is you know, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think you're asking something to the effect of, like, well, is this gonna hurt bookings, and is this gonna hurt bookings forever? You know, I don't think that's the case. It's just it's going to take some time for us to see, results financial results. Over these long-term investments that we're doing. But we're going to be acting for a while like there is a humongous opportunity because there is one. And, you know, until we get it. But I think we're going to be seeing good results from this even, you know, much sooner than that.

So it's not like our, you know, we're saying, oh, throw away all the bookings or anything that.

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. I think the only thing I'd add to that, Ralph, is that mean, you've seen us navigate this trade-off over the past three years as well. Users have grown 55% per year on average over the past three years, and bookings have grown about 45%. And all that while, we were making similar trade-offs, and now we're just slightly focusing a little bit different as we navigate those. So it's not that we haven't been making any of them. And you've seen that, like, in the rest of the year guide and the Q4 guide, there was a small impact to this. And, you know, it's not, you know, it's not that big.

And so would we expect some of that to persist into 2026? Sure. But, again, I think as a general framing of this, it's a relatively small, you know, financial impact from this kind of reprioritization. And we think that's worth it because as Luis said, it's a huge opportunity. The risk-reward seems right.

Ralph Edward Schackart: Okay. Great. Thanks, Luis. Thanks, Matt.

Operator: Your next question will come from Alex Sklar with Raymond James. Please unmute your audio, video, and ask your question.

Luis von Ahn: Hi, Alex.

Alexander James Sklar: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just following up on Wyatt's question and Ralph's your remarks to Ralph's at the end there. Just in terms of framing how meaningful some of these changes might be, is it as simple as maybe focusing a little bit less on paid conversion just to improve the freemium experience today or are there kind of broader thoughts about maybe moving video call down into some of the lower packages? And then I've got a follow-up.

Matt Skaruppa: Okay. So a way to see this is what you said first. It is, you know, as simple as in some of the experiments. By the way, not every experiment. Many experiments we run, you know, just improve on metrics. This is good. In some of the experiments where judgment calls are needed, we're gonna shift the balance a little bit more towards user growth. It's not a humongous change, but it is a change. In terms of are we gonna move video call to other tiers, etcetera, that is likely to happen. At least, we're likely to attempt to do that, but that is unrelated to this.

We were anyways, you know, we're always thinking about moving different features, in the different plans, and we and we'll test that. It may be the case that, I don't know a video call, but it may be the case that some of the max features are better in super or even in the free tier, and we'll test all of that. And while we test that, we're trying to optimize lifetime value of our like, platform LTV. We're trying to optimize for that. So, you know, we may see us test stuff like that.

Alexander James Sklar: Okay. Now I'm glad you said the free to pay conversion because that's exactly how it really manifests in the business. And I just wanna make sure we're clear on this. So for example, you know, Luis said over the past couple of months, he mobilized the company. You know, in September, we saw some of this, and what it looked like was slightly lower free to pay conversion. That free to pay conversion was still growing year over year. So it was still good free to pay conversion. It was just on the margin. It was slightly lower.

So think that's an example as you think about the financial impact, you're right to point out that's how it would flow.

Alexander James Sklar: Okay. That's great color there. And maybe, for Luis, just on the last call, you brought up this idea on video call about average number of words spoken per session. And you know, that was kind of a new metric you were going to testing towards. What have you learned so far now that you've kind of been optimizing for that metric? And then what's kind of the timeline to get some of the changes into the product as a result? Thanks.

Matt Skaruppa: Thank you for asking that question. So, yes, this is actually a great metric. And we've managed to move it. This is important to know about our company. Whenever we fixate on a metric, we are very good at moving it. And this particular metric, have been moving it, you it's more than doubled this year in terms of average number of words spoken per max subscriber. And so we're very happy with that. In terms of changes to video call that you'll see coming soon, one that I'm very excited about this. Video call at the moment is a monolingual experience in the language that you're learning. So if you're learning Spanish, it's all in Spanish.

That's great for practicing Spanish, but for beginner users, it's too hard. If you only know 20 words, it's very hard for you to have a full conversation just in Spanish. So the thing that we're testing now is these things we're calling guided video calls. Which are basically bilingual. So it's if you're an English speaker learning Spanish, this would be part in English, part in Spanish, and it's a lot easier for beginner users. We're seeing that when we give that to beginner users, they actually speak more words per call because they're actually able to do something. And so we think that this is gonna really help with max conversion.

By the way, I should say two things. Most of our users and certainly most of our max subscribers are beginner users. And so we really think this will help with mass conversion. The other thing that I'll say is that these guided vehicles, we're not advertising them yet, or we're not using them for converting users into max subscription yet. So we've put them out, and the next step is kinda to tell nonsubscribers that these exist so that we can get to subscribe. So we're pretty excited about what that can do to Max.

Alexander James Sklar: Alright. Great. Thank you both.

Matt Skaruppa: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from Miguel Arounian with Citi. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Miguel Arounian: Hey, good afternoon, guys. Sorry for the background. Just on AI and making education sort of, better than ever, you know, the way you're talking about things, can you just does that accelerate your road map in terms of adding new language learning modules? I know within the ones that you currently have, but moving it to new subjects. And, you know, what is it about that what's changing right now around AI that's letting you do that, today?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. The types of things you will see. It definitely accelerates our road map in more coverage of languages. That doesn't mean new languages. The reality is languages it's very lopsided what languages people wanna learn. You know, we now teach 40 languages. The rest that we don't teach, there's very little demand for them. But the top nine languages that we teach, these are kinda like the Spanish and English and French and German and Italian, like the big languages that people want to learn. The top nine account for the vast majority of our users. And what you'll see us do is you'll see us go faster in terms of adding content to these top nine languages.

And right now, for most of them, we don't get you to the place where we wanna get you, is the, a Duolingo score of 130. Which is equivalent to CFR level of B2, which is where you can get a knowledge job in that language. You will see that over the next few months we're going to be adding content that can do that for all the top nine languages. The other thing that you'll see is you'll see us just add a lot more different modules in the way we teach languages. That are just a lot smarter at teaching you. I mean, they're gonna adapt a lot better to you.

And you're also going to see us, just use a lot more things that use AI in the background to allow for many more free responses. And so it adapts a lot more to you. In terms of we're gonna also be using AI for other subjects. We're using it pretty heavily for math. For getting a lot more content out there. So we're gonna do that. In terms of adding other subjects, at the moment, we're not working on any other subjects. I'm not gonna say that we're not gonna add other subjects next year. That may be the case. You know, like you saw with chess, it took us nine months from idea to actually launching.

So it is possible that we'll add other subjects in the next year, although a little unlikely, but it is possible. But at the moment, we're not working on any other subjects.

Miguel Arounian: Okay. And then, maybe another broad one on AI and can you just talk about what you're seeing around compute costs, gross margins coming in a little better than expected? And, you know, is that coming in faster than you think? And, you know, how is that impacting the one of the big questions we get is generally on the competitive landscape and how AI is evolving that. What are you seeing there? Thanks.

Luis von Ahn: Okay. In terms of cost, look. Costs are coming down. They've come down just without us doing anything. Costs have come down. For us, this has not been the top priority. Optimizing costs. At the moment, the top priority is just making the best possible experience for our users that teaches the best and that is the most engaging. Every now and then, if we see low hanging fruit, we will in terms of optimizing cost, we will do it. But it's not like we have all of our people trying to optimize cost.

And the reason we can do that is because most of our AI features, at least the ones that cost the most money, are behind Duolingo Max. And because the price of that is, you know, is high enough that we're, you know, for us, the usage of AI is anyways profitable. So that's why we're not going nuts trying to optimize the cost on that. You know, in terms of the competitive landscape, you know, I think people, you know, people say things like, the two things that people say about the competitive landscape with AI are number one, why would anybody wanna learn a language with Duolingo when you can just learn it with ChatGPT? Okay.

I you know, we're not particularly worried about that. You know, the we've said it before. The main thing that we do really well not only do we teach well, the main thing that we do really well is keep people engaged. And in order to learn a language, you need to be engaged for years, really. It takes years to learn a language coming every day. And we need to keep you engaged actually doing it. And not only that, we also need to have curriculum for years for you to do that. So, you know, with ChatGPT, you can go there and you can ask it to teach you a few words here and there.

But, you know, it's not like you can have really curriculum for years. That teach that. So we're not particularly worried about that aspect. And then the other thing that people, you know, have said that they're worried about is oh, well, nobody's gonna wanna learn a language because, you know, we're gonna have simultaneous language translation and, okay. Also not worried about that. You know, I believe in 100% of the Google IO conferences over the last ten years, they have showcased simultaneous language translation. They do it every single year, and it's good. It works.

But this has been happening for the last ten years and we have not seen the desire to learn a language go down at all in fact, it has come up. And I think the biggest reason for that is because if you look at our users, they fall into two big categories. One big bucket is who are learning a language as a hobby. It kinda doesn't matter whether a computer can do that. It's because they're the same with chess, by the way. Computers are way better than humans at chess, but still, you know, we have millions of people wanting to learn chess. That so it doesn't matter if it's a hobby.

The other big group of people that are learning a language with us people who are learning English and they actually wanna learn English. Like, that is, you know, for them, you know, being able to have, a phone that they have to hold out, it just kinda that's not what they wanna do. So we just we're not particularly worried about that. It just so happens that, people like to tweet about that. We're not worried about it. Yeah. Great. Thank you.

Matt Skaruppa: Just a couple points on this. Since we the AI cost and max. So just to make sure everyone's aware, you know, Max is now 9% of our subscribers. It doubled in Q3 year over year in terms of bookings. So you know, it's clearly doing well in that regard. It's underperforming our lofty expectations for it, though. We expected you know, a bit more than that. And so that's why Luis is talking about guided calls and all the other things we're gonna do to help it achieve what we think it can achieve.

And then finally, because AI costs come down, though, I don't want folks to take away that we're not willing to invest as Luis is talking about the seminal moment we're in to go attack you know, a very large opportunity. You know, we've shown that we can grow to this scale incredibly profitably. You know, we're guiding to a 29% adjusted EBITDA margin for the year, which is very, very close to our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin range. And so as we do that, we are not gonna be afraid to invest in innovation. And so we're, you know, we're gonna make those investments over time.

Miguel Arounian: Thanks, guys.

Operator: Your next question will come from Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Mark Mahaney: Okay. A couple of things I wanted to go through. One, I know you had some price actions or price increases earlier in the year. What kind of reactions have you seen to those? Secondly, I think you were gonna hold off on doing any other I think it was just on, like, new people coming in on the standard plan. But your thoughts on rolling out other price increases. I don't think you're gonna do that now given your prioritization of user growth in the fourth quarter and beyond. But just talk about that.

And then third, just so we're clear on is largely due to the fact that you're gonna sort of slow down the conversion rate the deceleration, in bookings and revenue growth in Q4, from free to paid and really just focus on user growth. Just wanna make sure that's the main driver, and it's not like you're seeing a reduction in retention amongst paid subs higher churn amongst paid subs possibly because of the price increase. Thank you.

Luis von Ahn: I mean, I can take some of those. I'll take the last one. Yes. The change in Q4 is pretty much because of the shift to go to longer-term initiatives. And that means user growth. And also spending some of our not only are we prioritizing user growth, we're also spending relatively more effort shifting some effort to teaching better, which, you know, we're taking it some of that from our monetization efforts. So that's basically what you're seeing. And, you know, it's not like a humongous thing, but it is a shift. You know, in terms of price increases, you'll see us we'll be testing prices.

We'll be testing all kinds of things, and we'll see us launch the things that we think are good for the whole platform. I don't know exactly what's going to win. But you'll see us test prices. And by that, I mean, up and down. We'll probably test some prices much lower or a package. And this, I'm speaking about things that we may do, but I don't know if we'll end up doing them if we don't like the results. We'll probably do a package that is, like, half price, that is, like, you know, super light. That's the type of stuff that you may see us do.

Matt Skaruppa: Yeah. And, Mark, just to round it out, I think two points. One is, you know, we've talked a lot about taking price up as a price point. Every now and again, we do that. Luis said we're gonna continue to experiment with that, and that will continue to happen. ARPU has gone up this year every quarter. Kinda mid-single digits. That's also reflected in the guide. That's mainly come more from max than it has from price point changes. I will say that, you know, we did take pricing at various times over the past little bit. And that does influence our ability to discount during our one and only discount of the year.

So, again, if you have a higher price, you can run different experiments with the level of discounting. And, you know, one of the things that happens every Q4 when we talk about it is we talk about the ability in our Q4 bookings guide because Q4 is our most variable quarter because we run this New Year's promotion. This year, we did energy, which is a core pricing mechanic. And we have never run a New Year's promo with energy. So we're gonna be experimenting with all sorts of things as we get towards the end of the year with the promo.

On how we run it, how we show it and display it, when we run it, all of these types of things. So that is also baked in here. In the guide.

Mark Mahaney: Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Luis.

Luis von Ahn: Thank you, Mark.

Operator: Your next question will come from Ryan MacDonald with Needham and Company. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Ryan Michael MacDonald: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Luis, maybe stick with me a little bit on this question. I apologize in advance. But how learners people learn differs by generation and by demographic. I think we've already seen that with sort of advanced English earners. Require needing different requirements from Duolingo than maybe the traditional core base. So can you talk about how or if you are going to be targeting certain demographics you know, Gen Z learns or generations Gen Z seemingly learning different than millennials, with some of these product updates.

And then how should we think about the metrics that, you know, you will be looking towards to prove out this works because, obviously, user growth can be beneficial can be benefited by some changes, but that might not always mean that sticky user growth where MAUs might always convert to DAUs. So, again, long-winded question. I apologize. But how are you targeting, or what are you targeting in terms of these changes, and then are you measuring success?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. I mean, you asked about you know, it's true. Some people learn different than others. That is true. But you would be surprised that there are a lot more similarities than differences. The reality is I mean, you know, this is not just generations. Also, geographically. I mean, we always hear these things about, like, oh, well, people in that country do that or people in that country do that. What we have found time and again is that not only a lot of people learn pretty similarly, but also the things that get people to use the product more are pretty similar across the geographies. I mean, like a streak, it works in every country.

Or it just so there's a lot of similarities. So you know, at the moment, you're gonna see us just make a better course for the masses. That's what we're gonna be spending most of our effort on. Of course, the courses do adapt to each individual, and probably one of the places where there's most adaptation that is needed is the pace of learning. Really is different than it just happens that as you get older, you get slower. That is just that's noncontroversial. I somebody who's getting older and slower, I can tell you that. So the pace but that's very easy to adapt.

We're just we really do just adapt to the pace easily, and we've been doing that for a while. Now in terms of the metrics, that we're gonna be looking for, certainly, user growth is an important metric that we're gonna be that we're really keyed in on right now. Probably the most important metric in the company. So we're gonna be looking at that. Now the thing about improvements in teaching, and this is what I was saying before, they don't translate to user growth immediately.

Because, you know, if you improve a course and it's much better, over time, maybe people are starting feeling that they're learning a little better, so there's more retention, or maybe there's more word-of-mouth because the people are saying, like, it really worked for me. Let me tell you about it. So it does translate. We know that improvements in teaching do translate to user growth, but it's not immediate. And this is kind of what we mean by long term. You know what? We're gonna be looking at that there are things like just improvements in learning outcomes. We can measure how well people are learning.

And the good news is that really almost every year since we started measuring that, every year Duolingo is actually teaching better than the year before. We're probably going to see improvements in how well we teach move faster than in the past because we're taking it, you know, we're spending more effort on it. So we're probably gonna be seeing that. And our hypothesis but it is a hypothesis that I very much believe in, is that will translate to user growth. It's just not going to be linear or quick.

Ryan Michael MacDonald: Makes sense. Okay. And I'm also older and slower, Luis, so not no problems there.

Luis von Ahn: Aren't we all? Aren't we all?

Ryan Michael MacDonald: Exactly. We all are.

Luis von Ahn: But wiser. But wiser.

Ryan Michael MacDonald: That's right.

Luis von Ahn: We hope. We hope.

Ryan Michael MacDonald: Matt, I know you probably wanna obviously get into about 2026 guidance or anything like that, but obviously, lot of course investments, lot of investments. Can you just give us a sense of, like, the magnitude we should expect here in and, like, is there an expectation still that you can continue to EBITDA margins even through this process as we think over the next couple of years?

Matt Skaruppa: Yeah. I appreciate it, Ryan. And though even though you asked very in a guide to 2026 on this call, we'll do that in February. But I will you know, and I mentioned this on earlier question. We have made incredible progress towards our long-term margin while we've been growing the platform to a scale that has 130 million monthly actives, and we guided to nearly $1.2 billion of bookings this year. So we've shown that we can scale the business operate with discipline, and expand margins. And that's great.

And we wanna continue to do that, and we're going to continue to operate with discipline and grow the business, along the lines of what Luis is talking about, hopefully, to a whole other order of magnitude. While we do that, though, we're not afraid to invest. We think we can invest and still operate very profitably. But, we are not going to prioritize linear margin expansion from here. When we should be we view the opportunity as so big so we can prioritize investing. That's how we think about it.

Ryan Michael MacDonald: Got it. Really helpful. Thanks for the time.

Operator: Your next question will come from Andrew Boone with Citizens. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Andrew M. Boone: Thanks so for thanks for taking the questions. I'd love to talk about kind of a topic that we've revisited maybe two or three years ago, right, in terms of advanced English learners and, basically, the improvement of efficacy driving those learners to the platform, and kind of, like, whether AI has accelerated that and whether some of that thesis came to fruition and whether any of the slowdown in growth is impacting those types of learners. Or is there anything else you can kinda speak to in terms of that cohort?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. But as we mentioned, the you know, I don't know whenever it was. Couple of years ago, we started talking about this. English learning is a major opportunity. I mean, there's the 80% of the people who are learning a language in the world are learning English. And so we started investing in teaching better for English learners. We have done that. We've done a major launch here, throughout this year. We now all of our English courses now cover up until Duolingo score 130, which is the place where you can get a job a knowledge job in that language. So we have that, and we've been improving how well people learn English.

And we are seeing that in the metrics. Our number of English learners and certainly a number of advanced English learners has been growing steadily. The other thing that I'll say is that the regions at the moment that are growing fastest are English learning regions. And so, you know, we're seeing that, you know, Asia is a really good example that, you know, there's we are certainly still posting or have never stopped posting on Hinge content in Asia know, kind of from the social media side, but also we're just getting a lot more users there. So that's the parts that are growing the fastest. So I'm pretty happy with the progress there.

We did mention that it was going to take a while and it is taking a while, for really the work to get out. That Duolingo is very, very good at advanced English. And so while I believe that we've made good progress in that, it was still not there yet. As in this is an a thing that even throughout next year, we're gonna be seeing an increase in the number of advanced English learners that we're going to have.

Andrew M. Boone: And then can we just get an update in terms of family plan? I know there were a bunch of features that you guys were adding, and then just broader adoption. Where are we today and where can that go? Thanks, guys.

Matt Skaruppa: Yep. Yeah. In terms of broader adoption, the family plan continues to do well. I think it was about 29% of subscribers in the most recent quarter, so it's grown nicely. And I think there's a bunch of reason to believe that it's gonna continue to grow nicely. For example, last year, you know, in Q4 of last year, you know, really everything basically went right. Which is why we grew so fast last year. I think 42% year over year last year. Part of that was that the family plan during New Year's promo did really well. So there's, you know, there's reasons to believe that we still have room to run-in family plan. Andrew.

Andrew M. Boone: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Justin Tyler Patterson: Hi, Justin. Good afternoon. Know, I'd love to hear a little bit more about just learnings from energy. There was a lot of optimism on this product, you know, roughly ninety days or so ago. So would love to hear how just that has evolved. It might be playing into some of the trends we're talking about on this quarter. And then, you know, when we think about just the arc of reacceleration here, how much of this is really dependent on getting the product right versus really tapping into that cultural relevance that Duolingo had. Earlier this year and then, you know, encountered that speed bump around the social backlash. So much.

Luis von Ahn: Okay. So energy. We're very happy with energy. It did exactly what we wanted it to do. It increased bookings. And also increased DAUs. So that was good. The kind of the way it went is we launched all of energy for our iOS users first. Then for Android. We rolled it out over a span of a couple of months each one of these platforms. By now, it is done. We have, I don't know if it was a couple of weeks ago. We have every single person who has updated the app in the last I don't know, six to nine months, has energy in there.

And we're very happy because it did exactly what we expected it to do. And it's been launched. Now in terms of you know, you asked a question about product versus kind of marketing. Look. Both are important for us to grow, product and marketing. The longer-term thing is if we have a product that is extremely retentive, that also teaches really well, that's the best thing you can do. And that's where we spend most of our efforts. And we're gonna continue spending most of our efforts on that. Yes. The cultural relevance matters. But, you know, me, that's just an accelerant to something that is, you know, where the main dish is the product.

In terms of, you know, kind of being culturally relevant, etcetera, we really are seeing a complete pick on that. I don't know if you've watched, for example, the things that happened in Halloween. I mean, there were throughout the world, certainly, there were, you know, thousands of Halloween costumes that were just Duolingo costumes. So we see that we're seeing that quite a bit. And so we're not particularly worried about that.

Matt Skaruppa: Yeah. And the only thing I'd add to that, Justin, is, there is a you know, we talked about it on the last call, which is we've had some success particularly in the US spending a little bit more on actual marketing, seeing a nice return in the US in particular. And so that happened in Q3, and we're gonna you know, it's relatively small dollars, but we're gonna continue that into Q4 because know, the US growth, as we've talked about before, is slower than the rest of the world in part because of the rest of the world. You know, is growing really rapidly.

But you know, that continues, and so that's just the other element we'd add to the marketing mix.

Justin Tyler Patterson: Alright. Thank you both.

Operator: Our next question will come from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe. Please unmute your audio video and ask your question.

Shweta R. Khajuria: Hi, Luis. Hi, Matt. Thanks for taking my question. I actually have two. First one is on China. If you could please talk about how engagement trended in China through the quarter, through the year, and what your expectations are. What you're seeing there. And even if you could comment on the likelihood of MAX there either this year or next. And then second is on renewal rates at MAX in particular. Could you please talk about how that trended in Q3 so far and what your expectations are? Thank you.

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. Okay. Let me take the China one, and then I'll let Matt take the renewal rates one. Sure. Okay. China. We are, of course, doing very well in China. I believe it's our fastest growing country. It is our second largest country in terms of DAUs. And growing fast. It's still not, you know, that large of a fraction of our business. It's about five, 6% of our business at the moment. But it is growing and it is growing very fast. And the engagement is very high, retention is high, Max in China is being tested at the moment.

And so we have the permission to test it in China because of this as an LLM, you need to get permission to test this. So it is being tested. And so this is going to launch in some number of weeks or months. It's for me to tell you exactly because it does depend on approvals, but it is it's moved along pretty well. So, you know, what I'll say at the very high level about China is that it's a pretty major opportunity for us, but, of course, China comes with a risk. In that. You know, there's geopolitics, etcetera.

So the way we're treating it is we're not spending a crazy amount, for example, in marketing in China. We're spending a very modest amount there. But we just happen to be growing quite a bit. So it's nice, and it's a really nice opportunity. But if at any point in time something happens, you know, we just didn't end up investing all that much there. That's kinda how we're treating it. And then I'll let Matt talk about Max Renewals.

Matt Skaruppa: Yeah. So just to put it in context, actionals, you know, are important, but the broader I think there's a question earlier around broader, platform retention. That remains strong. Know, no real changes in that. And then on Macs in particular, we mentioned last call that we were gonna start to see in Q3 and then in Q4. Larger cohorts come through the max, renewal cycle. And what we saw is that max right now, again, it's they're still small as they've been ramping up, but was renewing slightly better than Super. But it's early, and Q4 is a relatively cohort. Relatively sizable cohort. So we'll talk about this again on the next call.

Shweta R. Khajuria: Okay. Thank you. Okay. Luis. Thanks, Matt.

Luis von Ahn: Mhmm. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from Han Yee Kao with CITICS. Please unmute your line. And audio and we'll ask your question.

Han Yee Kao: Hi, Louis. Hi, Louis. Hey. It's good. It's so good to have you connected, and it is really excited to hear the last question from like, Max is finally rolling out in China. And I'm going to expand that question a little bit further because, geographically, you see that you saw that China was the best growing country in the in quarter. And for this in this quarter, you talk about, like, growing more users. So what geographically would you think? Like, which country do you think, like or which region do you think will be most potential? To grow in the in the next quarter?

And my next and another question is related to your Duolingo score you published in this year's door count because, like, that was related to the efficacy. And so I'm wondering, like, how do you think that this kind of efficacy measurement will relate to the core user performance metrics. And how will that be, like, the key motivation for you to grow then grow the users in the next quarter. Yeah.

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. Thank you for the question. So, you know, region wise, the fastest growing region as a region is Asia for us. And we expect that to be true for a bit. I would expect that's gonna be true. I don't know the future, but I would expect that to be true, you know, for a bit. And certainly, China is leading that, but it's not just China. It's basically all of Asia that is growing pretty fast. In terms of the score, we're very excited about the score. You know, our announcement was that first of all, all of our major language courses now have the Duolingo score. And, also, you can share the Duolingo score on LinkedIn.

We're seeing quite a good number of people sharing their score on LinkedIn, and so that really means they're using it for job purposes. And we have that, the score there, this score also is, in the same range as our Duolingo English test, at least for English learners. And English learners are the one that would care more about a score like that particularly English learners in Asia are the ones that would care more about a score.

So we're very excited about that, and it is something you know, the ultimate goal least the major languages and certainly for English where rather than when people ask you, you know, how much French do you know or how much English do you know, at the moment what people say is like, oh, I'm intermediate. We want people to say, I am a Duolingo 60 in French. Or I'm a Duolingo 80 in English. That is what we want. And we think we're making pretty major progress.

In the case of the score, particularly for English, the Duolingo English test is now accepted by over 6,000 educational institutions, in the world, including all Ivy League universities and also, the 99 of the top 100 universities in the United States accept the Duolingo English test. So we think, you know, the combination of that prestige plus the large scale that we have in the app plus doing things like sharing with on LinkedIn will hopefully get us to be the standard for proficiency.

Han Yee Kao: Okay. Thank you. And one thing is that we are not using that using linking that much, like, in China. So we are really hoping to, like, connect it to the another social media platform in China in the future. We are working on that.

Luis von Ahn: I can't really give you details on that, but we are working on it's not just going to be LinkedIn. That we have the score on. We're working on that.

Han Yee Kao: Okay. Okay. Thank you, Luis. Just one moment.

Operator: I am showing no further questions, and this concludes the Q and A section of the call. I would now like to turn the call back to the host for closing remarks.

Luis von Ahn: Thanks, operator. I just like to thank everyone for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you on the next call.