HelloTalk says more than 70 million people have joined its language exchange app, and Tandem reports more than 35 million members, which makes peer-to-peer conversation practice one of the largest informal learning communities on the internet. The paid side of the market is just as visible: Duolingo, the category’s only listed company, reached 58.7 million daily active users and 12.7 million paid subscribers in Q2 2026, and its FY2025 revenue crossed 1 billion dollars for the first time. The demand behind both models is a speaking gap: only 28% of EU adults who know a foreign language say they are proficient in it (Eurostat, Adult Education Survey 2022). For the broader category, see our language learning statistics. We aggregated data from Duolingo’s SEC filings and shareholder letters, Eurostat, EF Education First, Sensor Tower, HelloTalk, Tandem, Busuu, Babbel, Preply, Speak and other primary sources listed in the methodology.
TL;DR
- HelloTalk reports 70M+ users, 260+ languages and 200+ countries (HelloTalk About page, 2026).
- Tandem reports 35+ million members and 300 languages to learn and teach (Tandem About and FAQ pages, 2026).
- Busuu says over 120 million people have registered (Busuu About page, 2026).
- Duolingo had 58.7 million DAUs (+23%) and 140.6 million MAUs (+10%) in Q2 2026 (Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter).
- Duolingo paid subscribers reached 12.7 million, up 17% year over year (Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter).
- Duolingo FY2025 revenue was 1,037.6 million dollars, up 39% (Duolingo Q4 2025 shareholder letter).
- 62% of Duolingo’s 2025 revenue came through the Apple App Store and 20% through Google Play (Duolingo 10-K, FY2025).
- Speak users spoke over 1 billion sentences in 2024, and the company raised 78 million dollars at a 1 billion dollar valuation (Speak, December 2024).
- Preply lists 100,000 tutors from 180 countries and a 1.2 billion dollar valuation (Preply, January 2026).
- English is the most studied language in 79% of countries on Duolingo (2025 Duolingo Language Report).
- 25.3% of EU adults aged 25 to 64 know no foreign language (Eurostat, AES 2022).
- Speaking is the weakest English skill in over half of the 123 countries measured (EF English Proficiency Index 2025).
1. Peer Communities: How Big Are Language Exchange Apps?
Language exchange is the oldest model in the category (you teach your language, a partner teaches theirs) and the apps built on it have grown into some of the largest learner communities anywhere. HelloTalk says it has 70M+ users across 260+ languages and 200+ countries (HelloTalk About page). Its own timeline shows how the curve bent: 1 million users in 2015, the year it added voice calls, and more than 30 million by 2020, when it added live streaming. Tandem, founded in 2015 and based in Berlin, says 35+ million members use its mobile and web apps (Tandem About page).
The catch is that every number in this section is a registered-account figure that companies publish about themselves. None of the dedicated exchange apps reports daily or monthly active users the way a public company must, so 70 million and 35 million describe reach, not engagement. Tandem also gates its community: the Tandem FAQ says applications are individually reviewed, members must be at least 16, and some regions have waitlists to keep the ratio of native speakers to learners balanced. That curation is a design choice that caps raw growth on purpose.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| HelloTalk users | 70M+ (260+ languages, 200+ countries) | HelloTalk About page, 2026 |
| HelloTalk messages | 1B+ (listed as a daily figure, self-reported) | HelloTalk About page, 2026 |
| HelloTalk user milestones | 1 million (2015), 30 million+ (2020) | HelloTalk About page, 2026 |
| Tandem members | 35+ million | Tandem About page, 2026 |
| Tandem languages and reach | 300 languages; over 180 countries | Tandem FAQ, 2026 |
| Tandem minimum age | 16, with individually reviewed applications | Tandem FAQ, 2026 |
| Busuu registered users | Over 120 million | Busuu About page, 2026 |
| Busuu for Business clients | Over 600 organisations | Busuu About page, 2026 |
Context note: Busuu is a course app rather than a pure exchange app, but its community feature has native speakers correct learners’ exercises, which places it on the same peer-feedback spectrum. Busuu has been part of Chegg since January 2022, according to its About page. Tandem also dropped professional tutors in 2020 to focus only on member-to-member exchange.
2. Duolingo as the Category Bellwether: Users and Retention
Exchange apps do not publish audited usage, so the best public read on how many people practice a language on their phone every day comes from Duolingo’s filings. Duolingo reached 58.7 million daily active users in Q2 2026, up 23% from 47.7 million a year earlier, with 140.6 million monthly active users (+10%) (Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter). The DAU line growing more than twice as fast as MAUs is the important part: Duolingo is getting existing users to come back daily rather than relying on new sign-ups.
The ratio tells the same story. Dividing Q2 2026 DAUs by MAUs (58.7 / 140.6) gives 41.7%, meaning roughly two in five monthly users open the app on a given day. Duolingo also reports its current user retention rate at an all-time high of 84%. For exchange apps, which depend on finding a partner who is online at the same moment, that daily habit is exactly what they struggle to manufacture. Our Duolingo statistics roundup covers the company in more depth.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Daily active users, Q2 2026 | 58.7 million (+23% YoY from 47.7M) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Monthly active users, Q2 2026 | 140.6 million (+10% YoY from 128.3M) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Daily active users, Q1 2026 | 56.5 million (+21% YoY) | Duolingo Q1 2026 shareholder letter |
| Daily active users, Q4 2025 | 52.7 million (+30% YoY) | Duolingo Q4 2025 shareholder letter |
| DAU/MAU ratio, Q2 2026 | 41.7% (58.7 / 140.6) | Calculated from Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Current user retention rate | 84%, all-time high (up about 1 point) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Streak revival event participants, June 2026 | 15.4 million learners | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Language courses offered | Over 250 | Duolingo 10-K, FY2025 |
Context note: DAU growth decelerated from 30% in Q4 2025 to 21% in Q1 2026 before reaccelerating to 23% in Q2 2026, which the company described as ahead of its expectations. Duolingo’s Q4 2025 letter also counts non-language subjects: its chess course passed seven million DAUs in under a year, so not every DAU is a language learner.
3. Monetization: Subscriptions, App Stores and Paid Penetration
The money in language apps is overwhelmingly subscription money. Duolingo’s FY2025 revenue was 1,037.6 million dollars, up 39%, on 1,158.4 million dollars of bookings (Duolingo Q4 2025 shareholder letter). In the first half of 2026, subscriptions brought in 508.9 million of its 590.4 million dollars in revenue, while advertising contributed 41.7 million, the Duolingo English Test 21.4 million and in-app purchases 16.4 million (Duolingo 10-Q, Q2 2026). That mix shows why exchange apps, which mostly sell premium tiers on top of a free community, chase subscriptions rather than ads.
Two numbers frame the ceiling. Only about 9% of Duolingo’s monthly active users were paid subscribers at the end of 2025, and 82% of its revenue flowed through just two app stores, 62% via Apple and 20% via Google (Duolingo 10-K, FY2025). The freemium funnel converts a small minority, and platform fees take a cut of nearly all of it. Babbel, the main subscription-only rival, says it was the first language learning app to pass 25 million subscriptions sold (Babbel About page).
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Duolingo revenue, FY2025 | 1,037.6 million dollars (+39%) | Duolingo Q4 2025 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo bookings, FY2025 | 1,158.4 million dollars (+33%) | Duolingo Q4 2025 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo revenue, Q2 2026 | 298.5 million dollars (+18%) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo paid subscribers, Q2 2026 | 12.7 million (+17% YoY) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Revenue mix, H1 2026 | Subscription 508.9M, ads 41.7M, English Test 21.4M, IAP 16.4M dollars | Duolingo 10-Q, Q2 2026 |
| Paid share of MAUs, end 2025 | About 9% | Duolingo 10-K, FY2025 |
| Revenue via Apple App Store / Google Play, 2025 | 62% / 20% | Duolingo 10-K, FY2025 |
| Babbel subscriptions sold | Over 25 million | Babbel About page, 2026 |
Context note: Duolingo guides FY2026 revenue growth of 15% to 18% and bookings growth of 10% to 12%, a clear slowdown from 2025’s 39% revenue growth. Q2 2026 bookings rose only 8% to 289.1 million dollars, even as revenue grew 18%, because revenue recognizes earlier subscription sales over time.
4. Speaking Practice: AI Conversation Partners Move In
The core promise of a language exchange app is conversation with a real person. That promise now has a software competitor. Duolingo says Video Call, its AI conversation feature, “remains one of our most impactful features” and that average words spoken per user in Video Call more than doubled over the last year (Duolingo Q1 2026 shareholder letter). In 2026 the company moved Video Call down to its Super tier to reach about ten times as many learners. Content production has scaled with AI too: Duolingo published 20,500 course units in Q1 2026 alone, against 7,100 per quarter in 2025.
Speak, an AI tutor focused on spoken fluency, is the clearest pure play. It says users spoke over 1 billion sentences in 2024, and it raised a 78 million dollar Series C at a 1 billion dollar valuation, bringing total funding to 162 million dollars (Speak, December 2024). Its September 2026 live tutor evaluation is a rare public look at quality: a generic assistant interrupted 27.6% of learner thinking pauses, falling to 13.6% once it was configured as a tutor. A human exchange partner has neither metric, which is the point: AI partners are always online and never impatient, while a peer brings a real accent and culture. Machine translation is part of the same shift, as our machine translation statistics show.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Duolingo Video Call words spoken per user | More than doubled in a year | Duolingo Q1 2026 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo course units published, Q1 2026 | 20,500 (vs 7,100 per quarter in 2025) | Duolingo Q1 2026 shareholder letter |
| Sentences spoken in Speak, 2024 | Over 1 billion | Speak Series C announcement, December 2024 |
| Personalized Speak lessons created, 2024 | 25+ million | Speak, December 2024 |
| Speak funding | 78M dollar Series C at 1B dollar valuation; 162M dollars total | Speak, December 2024 |
| Speak AI tutor interruption rate | 27.6% (generic assistant) to 13.6% (tutor role) | Speak, September 2026 |
| Speak tutor corrections | About 85% appropriate; about 80% of targeted errors caught | Speak, September 2026 |
| AI app downloads / IAP revenue, 2025 | 3.8 billion (doubled) / over 5 billion dollars | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
Context note: Speak’s tutor evaluation is small (27 sessions and 101 learner turns) and self-published, so treat it as a vendor benchmark, not independent research. The AI app totals come from Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026, which covers all generative AI apps, not only language tools.
5. Paid Humans: Tutors, Enterprise and the Valuation Signal
Free peer exchange sits at one end of a spectrum whose other end is paid human tutoring, and investors are still funding both. Preply lists 100,000 tutors from 180 countries teaching 90 languages, and reached a 1.2 billion dollar valuation with a 150 million dollar Series D in January 2026 (Preply About page). That puts a human tutoring marketplace at a higher valuation than Speak’s AI tutor at its last disclosed round, a sign that the market does not yet treat AI conversation as a full substitute for people.
Employers are the other paying customer. Preply reports more than 1,000 companies on Preply Business, Busuu more than 600 organisations, and Speak more than 200 enterprise customers with an 85% employee adoption rate. Exchange apps have largely stayed out of this channel, since an unmoderated peer chat is a hard sell to an HR department. Our workplace language training statistics and edtech funding statistics track both trends.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Preply tutors | 100,000 from 180 countries | Preply About page, 2026 |
| Preply languages and subjects | 90 languages, 120+ subjects | Preply About page, 2026 |
| Preply valuation | 1.2 billion dollars (150M dollar Series D, January 2026) | Preply About page, 2026 |
| Preply Business clients | 1,000+ companies | Preply About page, 2026 |
| Speak enterprise customers | 200+, with 85% employee adoption | Speak, December 2024 |
| Duolingo headcount, end 2025 | More than 900 employees, 430+ engineers | Duolingo 10-K, FY2025 |
| Language learning market size claimed by Preply | 115 billion dollars | Preply About page, 2026 |
Context note: the 115 billion dollar market figure is Preply’s own framing with no methodology on the page. We could not reach an independent market-sizing report to cross-check it (see Data watch), so treat it as a company claim. Valuations are private-round marks, not public market prices.
6. Demand: Which Languages, and How Big Is the Skills Gap?
The learner base is overwhelmingly about English. The 2025 Duolingo Language Report ranks English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese and Hindi as the ten most studied languages, and English is the most studied language in 79% of countries. Asian languages are the movers: Japanese passed German for fourth place and Korean passed Italian for sixth after Duolingo let speakers of more than 20 languages study them directly. Duolingo English Test takers came from 219 countries and 148 first languages.
The gap these apps sell into is speaking ability, not exposure. In the EU, 82.5% of primary pupils and 97.6% of lower secondary pupils learned English in 2024 (Eurostat, Foreign language learning statistics), yet only 28% of working-age adults who know a foreign language call themselves proficient in their best one (Eurostat, Foreign language skills statistics). The EF English Proficiency Index 2025, the first edition to grade speaking and writing with AI scoring, found speaking was the weakest English skill in over half of the 123 countries it ranked. Years of classroom study produce readers, not talkers, and that is the exact problem a conversation partner, human or AI, is meant to fix.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Countries where English is the most studied language | 79% | 2025 Duolingo Language Report |
| EU pupils learning English: primary / lower secondary | 82.5% / 97.6% (2024) | Eurostat, Foreign language learning statistics |
| EU lower secondary pupils learning 2+ foreign languages | 58.8% (Finland 97.2%, Ireland 5.2%) | Eurostat, 2024 |
| EU adults 25-64 knowing 0 / 1 / 2 / 3+ foreign languages | 25.3% / 37.6% / 24.7% / 12.3% (2022) | Eurostat, Adult Education Survey 2022 |
| Proficient in best foreign language (of those who know one) | 28% (Luxembourg 68.8%, Czechia and Italy about 15%) | Eurostat, AES 2022 |
| Knowing at least 1 foreign language: ages 25-34 / 55-64 | 84.4% / 65.0% | Eurostat, AES 2022 |
| Speaking weakest English skill | Over half of 123 countries | EF English Proficiency Index 2025 |
| EF EPI top score / Japan rank | Netherlands 624 / Japan 96th of 123 | EF EPI 2025; nippon.com |
Context note: the Eurostat adult data comes from the 2022 Adult Education Survey, the most recent available (Eurostat, AES 2022); the next wave is due in a later release. EF’s index is built from 2.2 million self-selected test takers on its free EF SET test, so it measures people who chose to take an English test, not national populations. In Asia, nippon.com reports Malaysia 24th, the Philippines 28th, South Korea 48th, China 86th and Japan 96th, with Japan in the very low band. Within Europe, EF’s rankings put France 29th, Spain 32nd and Italy 34th.
Summary: Language Exchange Apps by the Numbers
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| HelloTalk users | 70M+ | HelloTalk, 2026 |
| HelloTalk languages / countries | 260+ / 200+ | HelloTalk, 2026 |
| Tandem members | 35+ million | Tandem, 2026 |
| Tandem languages | 300 | Tandem FAQ, 2026 |
| Busuu registered users | Over 120 million | Busuu, 2026 |
| Duolingo DAUs, Q2 2026 | 58.7 million (+23%) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo MAUs, Q2 2026 | 140.6 million (+10%) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo paid subscribers, Q2 2026 | 12.7 million (+17%) | Duolingo Q2 2026 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo revenue, FY2025 | 1,037.6 million dollars (+39%) | Duolingo Q4 2025 shareholder letter |
| Duolingo paid share of MAUs | About 9% | Duolingo 10-K, FY2025 |
| Duolingo revenue via Apple App Store | 62% | Duolingo 10-K, FY2025 |
| Babbel subscriptions sold | Over 25 million | Babbel, 2026 |
| Speak sentences spoken, 2024 | Over 1 billion | Speak, December 2024 |
| Speak valuation | 1 billion dollars | Speak, December 2024 |
| Preply tutors / valuation | 100,000 / 1.2 billion dollars | Preply, January 2026 |
| AI app downloads, 2025 | 3.8 billion | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| English most studied language | 79% of countries | 2025 Duolingo Language Report |
| EU adults with no foreign language | 25.3% | Eurostat, AES 2022 |
| EU adults proficient in best foreign language | 28% | Eurostat, AES 2022 |
| Countries where speaking is the weakest English skill | Over half of 123 | EF EPI 2025 |
Methodology and Sources
Every figure above was read during research for this article and traced to the organization that produced it. Company community sizes come from the companies’ own pages and are labeled as self-reported. Duolingo figures come from SEC filings and shareholder letters filed on EDGAR.
- Duolingo: Q2 2026 shareholder letter, Q1 2026 shareholder letter, Q4 2025 shareholder letter, 10-K for FY2025, 10-Q for Q2 2026, 2025 Duolingo Language Report
- HelloTalk: About page
- Tandem: About page, FAQ
- Busuu: About page
- Babbel: About page
- Preply: About page
- Speak: Series C announcement (December 2024), Live tutor lessons evaluation (September 2026)
- Sensor Tower: State of Mobile 2026
- Eurostat: Foreign language skills statistics (AES 2022), Foreign language learning statistics (2024), Adult learning participants (AES 2022), which puts EU adult participation in education and training at 47% in 2022 against a 60% target for 2030
- EF Education First: EF EPI 2025 press release, EF EPI rankings; Asian ranks via nippon.com
- Data watch: No dedicated language exchange app publishes audited daily or monthly active users, so HelloTalk’s 70M+ and Tandem’s 35M+ are registered-account claims and are not comparable with Duolingo’s DAU and MAU figures. HelloTalk’s About page lists 1B+ messages as a daily figure, which we could not verify independently. We could not reach a category-level download and revenue estimate for language learning apps: the Sensor Tower language-learning figures circulating in trade press were only visible through a blocked aggregator page, so we dropped them, and Grand View Research’s market-sizing pages returned 403 errors, leaving Preply’s 115 billion dollar market claim without a cross-check. Pew Research and American Councils pages on US school language enrollment were also unreachable. Busuu’s revenue is no longer broken out in a public filing we could access. The Eurostat adult language data (2022) is the most recent available and older than this year’s other figures; Speak’s user metrics date from December 2024. Newer data is expected from Duolingo’s Q3 2026 results and the next EF EPI edition.
Last updated: October 3, 2026. We update this roundup quarterly, and the next refresh is expected when Duolingo publishes its Q3 2026 shareholder letter and EF Education First releases the EF English Proficiency Index 2026.