How Duolingo Rakes in $500M Yearly When 80% of Its Users Don’t Pay – WSJ

Duolingo has been the top education app in Apple’s App Store for most of the past decade, making the company a revenue of around $500 million annually. But most people who use the language lesson app do not pay. So how does a free educational app manage to have a valuation of $7.7 billion?

WSJ explains how Duolingo is using AI-enhanced experiments to subsets of its user base, tailoring its offering to hook users like an addictive video game.