Duolingo UX Teardown: A Free Trial With a Charge Day and No Price
A UX teardown of Duolingo's signed-out web path from course catalog to Super: a research hub with no sign-up button, a plan table with no prices, and a trial timeline that names the day you're charged but not the amount.
The last thing on Duolingo's Super page is a three-step timeline headed "how your free trial works". Today you unlock the Super features. On Day 5 you get a reminder. The Day 7 line reads "Your account is charged, cancel anytime 24 hours before". It doesn't say how much.
Course discovery starts with a visual catalog
A four-column grid makes languages and adjacent subjects easy to scan, while learner counts establish popularity before a course is chosen.
Thirteen screens from one signed-out visit: the course catalog, the Spanish course page, the research pages it links to, and the Super subscription page down to that timeline. No price appears on any of them. The capture stops before Get started and before the trial button, so lessons, signup and checkout are outside this teardown.
Picking a course
The catalog is a dark page titled "Courses for English Speakers", with an "I speak English" dropdown on the right. Courses sit in a four-column grid of cards, each with a flag, a name and a learner count: Spanish 42M, French 22.7M, Japanese 18M. Chess and Math are in the same grid between the languages, with their own icons and no learner count.
Clicking Spanish opens a white page with one sentence, "Learn Spanish in just 5 minutes a day. For free.", and two buttons under it, Get started and I already have an account. The header at the top of this page holds only the logo and the site-language menu. Once you scroll, a sticky header appears with Get started and Login in it, and it is there in every later frame of this page.
Four headings about the course
Below the fold the page makes its case in four short blocks, each a green heading, two or three lines of grey text and an illustration: "free. fun. effective.", "backed by science", "stay motivated", "personalized learning".
None of the four captured blocks shows a lesson. The nearest thing is a drawing of a phone with a progress bar and four character tiles.
One phrase in the first block is a link: "research shows that it works".
The research pages have no Get started
The link leads to a dark page headed "duolingo works".
Under "top results" are three claims with green ticks, each with a linked phrase. You can learn five university semesters' worth of French or Spanish in five sections of Duolingo. After a month of using Video Call in Duolingo Max, Japanese learners of English improved their speaking. Learning Spanish on Duolingo for four months improved seniors' brain health.
The header on this page has five tabs: Efficacy, Method, Studies, Resources, Research. Get started and Login, which followed the visitor down the course page, are gone. The Method tab, the next page in the capture, has the same header. It opens on "we teach with science" and scrolls to a two-circle diagram, Fun and Effective, with "Learning by doing" in the overlap. In the three frames captured on these pages, a visitor persuaded by the evidence has no button to act on it. The way back to sign-up is the browser's back button or the logo.
The second claim is about Duolingo Max. The plan table later in the visit has three columns, Free, Super and Super Family, and Max isn't one of them.
Three plans, no prices
The Super page is navy, with the headline "learn a new language the fun way" and a white button, "Start my 1 week free". Below it, under "no commitment. cancel anytime.", is the comparison.
Free has one tick, Learning content, and five crosses: Unlimited Hearts, Skills practice, Mistakes review, Free challenge entry, No ads. Super has all six ticked. Super Family swaps in a final row, "Enjoy faster learning on up to 6 Super accounts".
The course page promised Spanish "For free". This table is the first place in the visit that lists what the free tier leaves out, and it does so clearly, row by row. It uses one term it hasn't explained. "Hearts" appears nowhere earlier in the thirteen screens, so a newcomer can see that the free tier lacks unlimited ones and can't tell what runs out.
The Family column has no Mistakes review row. Super lists it and Family, the larger plan, doesn't. From the table alone you can't tell whether Family lacks the feature or the row was dropped.
There is no price in any of the three columns, and no monthly or annual toggle (NN/g on showing prices).
The charge day
Further down, after a block saying a subscription helps keep Duolingo free for other learners, comes the timeline from the opening.
The timeline has three dated steps, an icon for each, and the reminder gets a day of its own. It says before the trial starts that Day 5 brings a warning and Day 7 a charge.
The headline above the table said "cancel anytime". Here it has become "cancel anytime 24 hours before", which puts the real deadline a day ahead of the charge, around Day 6. The charge has no amount, no currency and no plan name. Super and Super Family share this one timeline.
"Start my 1 week free" is offered four times across three of the four Super screens, and a Try Super button sits in the header once you scroll. The price is presumably behind it; the capture stopped short of pressing it.
What we'd change
Put the amount on the Day 7 line: what is charged, in which currency, for which plan. The timeline already has a row for it.
Change "cancel anytime" in the headline to match the 24-hour condition, or drop the condition.
Add one line under the table saying what Hearts are, and settle the Mistakes review row in the Family column.
Carry Get started into the research header. The course page sends people there to be convinced, and the page that convinces them has no sign-up button.
Take it further
We read Duolingo through the UX Clarity framework, the same lens as our Full UX Audit. The question here was whether a visitor can tell what a free trial will cost before starting it. For how that becomes a ranked list of fixes, read what a real UX audit looks like.
Capture notes: thirteen screens from one signed-out visit to duolingo.com on 29 September 2026, at 1440×900, in English, from Brazil. No currency was shown. The visit stopped at the trial timeline; Get started, Login and the trial buttons were not pressed, and the linked studies, blog post and method report were not opened. Only parts of each page were captured, so a price or a lesson preview could sit in a section between frames. Learner counts, plan rows and trial terms were true that day and may change. The Duolingo homepage was outside this capture.
Sources: NN/g — Show Price.
Want to know whether your own trial page says what it costs? Apply for a Full UX Audit →
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