Software as a Serf: Duolingo and Freemium Software
Freemium
A particular niche in software-as-a-service (SaaS) is Freemium software. Freemium, a portmanteau of free and premium, denotes a software that users can certainly use for free, but where certain features will require the user to pay. There are a number of ways that software developers can structure what is free and premium in a Freemium service, including how users pay for the extra features and what specific features require users to open their wallets.
Freemium is not completely dependent on the software-as-a-service framework. TurboTax, for example, has free and deluxe versions available, but the software doesn’t communicate with TurboTax servers and its code base resides neatly on a user’s machine, so TurboTax may be freemium but it is not a SaaS. However, SaaS has provided a number of benefits to sellers of Freemium software, and I would wager at this point that most Freemium tools are SaaS.
The main benefit that SaaS provides the Freemium model is the ability to easily make changes to the software. With Freemium software, there always needs to be something that would incentivize the free users to become paying users, because paying users keep the company profitable. The ability to change the code base in an easy manner allows the Freemium provider to easily change what is available for free, and what is premium, and thereby change those incentives. Often, this means updating the software to make the free experience worse. A splashy example of this is Evernote, a note-taking service which, in 2016, reduced the number of features available for free and raised the price of their premium services, hoping to direct more free users to the premium version and thereby make a profit.
That is, Freemium likes SaaS because without the right to maintenance I have previously described, without the right to maintain an old version of the software, they can easily make software worse, like Evernote did, to force the free user onto the premium track. It’s a great example of Freemium not being free: here, free users pay with the anxiety that at any moment, their favorite tool might be taken away from them, rendering their large amalgamation of notes useless (if you think that’s a bit hyperbolic, here are is a contemporaneous guide for free Evernote users wanting to transfer note-taking tools, and having spoken to free users who feel trapped in Evernote due to the large number of notes they’ve written therein, it is a real anxiety).
Duolingo, which I’ve already spilled good ink on, has recently tweaked its services in a way I believe to be instructive when analyzing how freemium SaaS leverages the foregone right to maintenance to make life tougher on free users. These changes are recent, made within the last week, and so while I didn’t want to talk about SaaS again so soon, I couldn’t help but jump to explicate this fresh new example.
The Duolingo Freemium Case Study
Free, and Pro
Duolingo is a Freemium language-learning app that provides short foreign language lessons. Duolingo uses a tiered model where users are either free users, or they pay a monthly subscription fee to upgrade their account to Duolingo Pro. For this case study, I need to delineate a few ways that Duolingo Pro, and the free version of Duolingo, differ. This all applies to the Android version of Duolingo; there are a number of small but significant differences between the iOS, Desktop, and Android version of Duolingo’s software, but as an Android owner I won’t opine on any other version.
Here is a list of features that differ among free and pro versions of Duolingo that are pertinent to this discussion:
Advertisements: Just because free users don’t spend any money doesn’t mean that Duolingo does not make a profit off of them. Duolingo includes advertisements after each lesson through Google’s built in advertising service for Android. Pro users have an ad-free experience.
Hearts: I have already written about hearts, a feature introduced to the Android version of the app in late 2020. A player can have a maximum of five Hearts. Whenever the player gets a practice problem wrong, they will lose a heart. If they run out of hearts, they will be ejected from the lesson. Players without hearts are then barred from starting a new lesson. They will have to get at least one heart back before starting a new lesson. In this way, users are limited in their ability to learn their target language, because a lack of hearts disqualifies a user from taking more lessons. Pro users have unlimited hearts, and can therefore take as many lessons as they would like regardless of the number of mistakes they make on practice problems. This should show you the benefit of having Pro: you get access to unlimited lessons.
To get more hearts, free-tier players have the following options. 1. Players can wait four hours. Every four hours of real time, players receive one heart. 2. Players can review a completed lesson. I will discuss what constitutes a completed lesson below, but know for now that there is an exception to the no-hearts-no-lessons rule, and that by doing practice problems from one of these special lessons, players will gain a heart. 3. Players can watch an advertisement. While advertisements indeed play at the end of lessons, these won’t count. Instead, the player will have to watch an ad specifically for the purpose of getting a heart back.
Then, there are some features common to both free and premium players with some salience for this discussion. As stated before, in a game, systems often enmesh themselves with one another: you can’t explain a homerun in baseball without first explaining bases, points, and pitching. And so, these related systems will exacerbate the above differences between free and premium users in a probative manner, and I should explain them before proceeding.
Experience Points: When players complete lessons, they win experience points. More points means more gems, and higher placement in the weekly challenge league. Experience points are also a useful, if imperfect, shorthand for progress in a language. I personally aim for 100 or more experience points a day to keep my language learning on track. Additionally, I am a competitive person, and therefore like to win the weekly challenge league. Therefore, experience points are a useful carrot to get me to take on lessons even when I’m tired and don’t much want to learn Italian. If I suck it up, I can win points, and thereby dominate in the league.
Reviewing Completed Lessons: To understand the completed lesson, let me walk you through once more how Duolingo’s language lessons work.
Duolingo’s courses are broken into individual modules, groupings of lessons with similarly themed grammar and vocabulary. For example, in Italian, we have Food 1 and Occupations. Each module has some number of lessons, 6 for Food 1 and 3 for Occupations. Each module also has six levels: Purple, Blue, Green, Red, Orange, and Golden. Each level has the same number of lessons, and each lesson covers the same vocabulary as it did in the previous level, but these lessons get harder and harder: in Purple Food 1, you are mostly doing flashcards and matching games related to food. In Orange, you produce full sentences in the target language: “Lei mangia la mela rossa”.
When you’ve reached the Golden level for a module, then you have completed that module. That doesn’t mean that you’re done with that module forever though. You can elect to review completed modules at the golden level to earn points. And, for free players, returning to these old lessons that you have previously mastered will earn you an extra heart.
When you elect to review a Golden-level, completed module, you are offered two choices, and this fact will be probative for recent changes:
- You can review the lesson on Easy Mode. If you complete this lesson, you will gain 10 experience points. For comparison: a regular lesson from a non-golden-level module would also yield 10 experience points. Easy mode has easier practice problems, mostly flashcards. You can expect about 20 practice problems in Easy Mode.
- You can review the lesson on Hard Mode. If you complete this lesson, you will gain 20 experience points. For comparison: that’s twice what a regular lesson from a non-golden-level module would yield. Hard Mode has harder practice problems, though the difficulty of these is actually relevant to our discussion of rebalancing below. You can similarly expect 20 practice problems, like in Easy Mode.
To summarize all of the above: Experience points matter to competitive players like myself, and the only way, as a free player, to get these experience points is by maintaining my hearts. I can maintain my hearts either by reviewing completed lessons, watching advertisements, or waiting real world time. I will note that for a competitive player like myself, someone who likes winning the league and wants to efficiently learn my target language, waiting four hours is not acceptable. This leaves me with three options when electing to regain hearts: I can watch an ad, complete a golden-level lesson on easy mode, or on hard mode.
Recent Rebalancing
Earlier this week, the difficulty of hard-mode completed lessons greatly increased. Prior to this rebalancing, hard-mode lesson looked most like Green-level or Red-level lessons, whereas now they work more like Orange-level lessons. The difference would be that before, you were expected to translate sentences to English, whereas now you are expected to translate English sentences to the target language, something much more difficult.
Ultimately, this is likely a good thing for learning. These are, after all, lessons I have previously mastered, and so I should expect their review to be strenuous. I never liked it, personally, that hard mode was not as hard as other lessons.
I used to see it as somewhat of a loophole: when you take on a hard-mode lesson, you take on practice problems that are much easier than a regular lesson–given you’ve mastered this material, and you aren’t translating to a target language–and yet you could expect to earn double the points. And, for us free players, you had the added benefit of regaining a heart. Then, on weeks where I’m focused on winning the league, I would take on a few lessons, inevitably make mistakes that would cost me hearts, and then would replenish my hearts by taking on lessons with low risk and high experience point yield.
There was indeed pedagogical benefit to this practice; while it felt like a loophole, important learning certainly did occur. Revisiting old material, even material you have mastered is critical for language-learning. Duolingo implemented the ability to review old mastered material in order to take advantage of what is called spaced repetition, a powerful learning technique that requires revisiting old material.
In many ways, I do welcome the increased difficulty levels of the completed lessons. This will, I hope, get me to take on more difficult coursework, and thereby attain fluency in my target language.
Yet, these changes have an outsized impact on my usage of Duolingo because I am a free player. Remember, I have three options when choosing how to regain my hearts:
- I can watch an ad
- Complete a golden-level lesson on easy mode
- Or complete a golden-level lesson on hard mode.
Since the golden-level lesson on hard mode was not in any salient way more difficult than a golden-level lesson on easy mode, I used to never partake in option number 2. And since there was such a bounty of points available in number 3, I never would take option number 1. Option number 3, in which I translated sentences from the target language to English, was a clear victor here.
Now, this is not the case. If I’m someone looking to win at the league, which has been an important carrot for making me learn Italian, then this rebalancing makes option 1 and option 2 suddenly look a lot better. And I wager that this excites the people at Duolingo, especially if I pick option number 1, which directly wires ad revenue into their account.
Remember: I’m the sort of person that Duolingo hates. I am an avid user of the service; according to its yearly round-up, I am a top 1% user of Duolingo. I can spend a couple of hours on the app a day. And I don’t subscribe to Duolingo Pro.
As such, I don’t think that this rebalancing is merely in the pedagogical interest of players. I did indeed want to have a way to review lessons at a harder difficulty level, and this fits that bill. But I think this change is primarily to make watching advertisements a more tantalizing option for hardcore players such as myself. This rebalancing has had this effect: I watched my first ad to regain a heart ever earlier this morning. For premium players, they see no such trade-off: they now simply have the option to take harder review lessons, and thereby get the most out of spaced repetition. It is only free players that need to think through these consequences.
The outcome of this rebalancing is to increase the time free users sit in front of ads by reducing the advantage of completing a hard mode lesson to regain hearts. In this way, it advantages Duolingo, and potentially disadvantages free users.
This is, again, not as clear cut as Evernote’s decision to strip features from their product. It is not some strict case study in how Duolingo conspires to disadvantage free users in order to promote advertisers and push free users into the premium tier. The hearts system alone provides more clear cut heroes and villains: it exists to penalize free players and incentivize switching to the premium tier. But in this situation, Freemium models make it so that minor changes to mechanics unrelated to tiers and subscription has impacts that disproportionately affect free users. Freemium is better than having no software at all, but the issues with SaaS and the right to maintenance that I have previously outlined does indeed make Freemium software a little different than free software. With no right to maintenance, we are subject to changes, and changes will have a more complicated, and arguably negative, impact on free players.