“In India, there’s reluctance to pay for app”: Duolingo CEO says less than 1% of a million users would pay

Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn disclosed in a recent interview that while the app has millions of Indian users, but less than 1% are paid customers.

Indians have a reluctance to pay for apps, claims Duolingo CEO

In a virtual interview with the Economic Times, Ahn said India is the fifth-largest country in terms of users and is growing. They are all active users as well. However, the American edutech company has not been able to generate any revenue from India.

“In India, there’s a real reluctance to pay for the app,” the CEO shared. “Worldwide, 9% of our monthly active users pay to remove ads. In India that percentage is well under 1%.”

When asked if he had an idea in mind to make the Indian user pay, the edtech startup founder laughed and asked the interviewer if there was any suggestion from their end!

The entrepreneur expressed optimism, saying this will change in future and people will be more okay with digital subscriptions. At the moment, Duolingo covers geographies with lower GDP per capita, and those are the ones that don’t pay.

Further, he reasoned that the free version of the app is good.

“We have about 12 markets that we pay attention to and India is one of them,” he remarked. “We are taking the long view with India. And we expect that over time, we will be able to monetise here,” he told ET.

Though artificial intelligence is expanding in scope and use, the Duolingo CEO said that people will keep learning languages even 20 years from now. 

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About Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn invented CAPTCHA as a graduate student and handed it to Yahoo for free, before going on to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. 

He won the MacArthur “genius” grant at 28 and later founded reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google, where he was also working.

He left all of that to launch a gamified language-learning app, Duolingo, in 2012. The app has more than 130 million monthly active users. 

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