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Duolingo is the world's most popular language-learning app — a free, gamified mobile course that hooks ~133M monthly users with streaks and a cartoon owl, then converts ~12M of them into paying subscribers. It runs lean on AWS, layers OpenAI's GPT models into its premium 'Max' tier, and earns ~84% of revenue from subscriptions, with the rest from ads, in-app purchases and the Duolingo English Test.

In simple terms

Duolingo rents its computers from Amazon, borrows brains from OpenAI (and its own Birdbrain), wraps them in cartoon lessons made by in-house studios, then ships the app through Apple's and Google's stores to ~133M learners — taxed 15-30% on every subscription those stores collect.

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