Duolingo · B2C · language learning app
Give 3 free days of the paid tier, no card needed, even to current subscribers
Effective for free-to-paid and for upgrading subscribers to the top tier, per guest
What they did
What happened
In their words
How Clarity and Personalization Help Drive Duolingo’s Growth – Anmol Tiwari, Duolingo
Anmol Tiwari… all of this is that imagine if I asked you from a business standpoint, or even from a user standpoint, you might benefit from having trying a product over multiple periods, but spread across a little bit. And from a business standpoint, it's better because now you as a user have to decide four times, three or four times, whether you want to make this purchase or not. And of course, aggregated across those, we'd see that it's an effective lever.
Anmol TiwariThe second point that I want to make is what we've seen is that of course, not everyone is as comfortable to start a trial. Or for whatever reason, there's a lot of hesitation despite all the things that we try and do to try and increase clarity of when you're going to get a reminder, et cetera. So we have this concept of a free taste where we basically can offer you a trial-like experience, which is three days, but with no strings attached. You get three days of the service. You can try the subscription tier, Super or Max. And at the end of that period, you get to decide whether you want to convert or not, or during the period, you can decide whether you want to convert or not.
Anmol TiwariAnd that's been a really effective lever for not just free to paid, but paid to paid, because to your point about Apple, it's quite difficult for ... We can't offer another free trial one, you're already a paying subscriber. But what we can do is we can offer you a free taste and then still take you back to the original subscription tier that you were on. And that's been a really effective lever for us to get people to try our highest tier, Max, with video calls, especially.
Anmol TiwariOne last point is, when you think about free taste or free trials, it doesn't just extend to the tiers or the whole product. Sometimes you can even extend it to a single individual feature. We have something called a video call, which is part of the Max tier. And what we've seen sometimes is offering just enough free tastes of that video call just in isolation. Just one call is actually not a bad way to try and get people to try a feature and see …
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More from this episode
- Let trial users pick which day they get the reminder before being chargedTested; added friction but built trust and delayed cancel decisions. No numbers given
- Show what happens on each trial day and exactly how refunds workGuest says clarity beats persuasion for trial starts; no numbers
- When users run out of hearts, offer a free trial so they keep their lesson progressUsers much more likely to start a trial; no numbers
- Ask new users in onboarding if they want to learn with or without adsSignificantly higher uptake; one of the biggest wins of the year
- Cut the free trial from 14 days to 7More conversions overall and experiment results twice as fast
- Offer the same user a free trial three or four times over timeEffective in aggregate across attempts, per guest; no numbers
- Give users one free AI video call from the top tierEffective lever for getting people to try the feature, per guest
- Give the free 3 days as a reward right after a finished lessonFelt more rewarding than on the learning path; no numbers
- When free days end, say 'Your benefits have ended' and show how to rejoin
- Use each user's signals to pick between your own upgrade ads and paid adsGood wins, per guest; no numbers
- Let a bandit algorithm pick which upgrade ad each user sees after a lessonSome wins so far, still improving; no numbers
Tags: reverse-trial, free-taste, no-card, tier-upgrade