I have just completed a 1000 days streak on Duolingo learning French (from English) and I wanted to make a blog post dedicating this achievement to Duolingo and all the language enthusiasts that are using it across the world.

In my humble opinion, as a technologist and ethusiast myself, Duolingo is one of the best apps that have ever existed.

I have to say that there wasn’t any time while using it where I didn’t notice the effort that went into building it. From the language coverage, to the speech features to the gamification mechanics.

It truly is a great way to learn a language. I’ve been the happiest learning French.

But let’s be honest, It’s reaaaaally difficult to actually keep a streak intact and do your Duolingo lesson EVERY SINGLE DAY:

Before I go over the amount of streak freezes I used (which I’m not super proud of) let me list here the life events that I went through (more or less as a way to justify the amount 🙈):

  • A global pandemic and several lockdowns
  • A brain stroke
  • My wedding
  • My wife’s pregnancy and that we had a baby
  • An international moving (UK to Belgium)

So there, a lot of life changing events and, in spite of all of them, I kept my streak. Now let’s look at the amount of streak freezes I used and how much that costed me

Stats⌗

So I looked at it today and I started my streak on Sunday, 26/04/2020 and it ended today 09/01/2024, which means that to achieve a “1000 days” streak, I used a Streak freeze in 353 out of 1353.

streak dates

Whenever you use a streak freeze (didn’t do a lesson before your local 00:00) Duolingo will keep your streak, as long as you still have streak freezes. You can equip max 2, at times max 5, but to get more, you have to acquire them using Gems which is the in-app currency (traded for real money).

Gems⌗

If we consider each streak freeze to cost 200 gems then I spend 70,600 gems (200 gems * 353 days not doing a lesson) in the last 1353 days.

gems

Based on the price of the Gem bundles, I can see the price per streak freeze is lower as you buy more.

1200 Gems - €4.99 200 Gems - ~€0.83

3000 Gems - €9.99 200 Gems - ~€0.66

6500 Gems - €19.99 200 Gems - ~€0.61

I’ll use the average price of €0.7 per Streak freeze

Also, let’s say that of the total days that I did not do a lesson (353), there were some Streak freezes that I used that I did not had to pay for (i.e duolingo streak society ) so let’s approximate that after month 4, I had extra streak freezes every month…

(3 free streak freezes) * 40 months / 353 days of streak freezes = ~ 34% of free streaks

So let’s say I had to pay for 66% of the streak freezes

353 days * .66 of paid streak freezes ~= 233 paid streak freezes

Now for the ballpark

223 streak freezes * €0.7 per streak freeze ~= €163

Subscription⌗

I’m part of the Duolingo Family Plan (thanks to my awesome MIL), and it seems that the price in € is €122.99

Let’s assume that, in the plan there are 6 members, so each member is €122.99/6 = €20,5/year

and let’s round my participation to 4 years.

€20,5 * 4 = €82

In total, I’ve estimated that I’ve spent ~€245 on this app.

This guy is a main character and his name is Oscar. Beautiful. oscar

I’m really proud of having achieved this much consistency throughout this linguistic learning experience.

But I have decided to stop alltogether. Having moved to a French speaking country, I feel that I am not longer giving my full attention to the lessons and thus, not learning as much as the immersive experience it is actually living the language.

In a way, I’ve achieved my goal.

Thanks for everything Duolingo.