Is D&D Beyond free?

Yes. A free D&D Beyond account reads the Basic Rules, builds six characters and six encounters, and hosts games on Maps. The paid parts are the books, at $29.99 each for the digital 2024 core rulebooks, and two subscriptions: Hero at $2.99 a month and Master at $5.99. Neither subscription includes a book.

What is free, and what each tier adds

The 2024 Basic Rules on the site have all twelve classes, nine species, four backgrounds, the feats, spells and equipment chapters, a Dungeon Master section and a few hundred monster stat blocks. A group can play a full campaign on them without buying anything.

The subscription prices

US prices before tax. Every website figure carries the word “from”. Twelve times the website's yearly monthly figure lands within five cents of Apple's annual price, so the two surfaces agree. The 30-day free trial is offered on the website only.

The books are where the money goes

The digital bundle is exactly three times $29.99, so buying it saves nothing over the three books one at a time. The saving is in the combined bundle: the digital and printed sets bought separately come to $239.94, and together they are $179.97, so the digital copies cost $30 on top of the printed ones (derived from the Marketplace prices).

Books are also sold inside the iPhone app. Apple's In-App Purchases row lists the 2014 and 2024 Player's Handbooks, the Dungeon Master's Guide, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Monsters of the Multiverse, all at $29.99, beside the four subscription plans. Apple shows ten items at most, so the list is a sample of the shop. There is no promoted purchase above the App Privacy panel. Google Play shows only an “In-app purchases” badge, with no items-and-offers section when we read it on 31 October.

When Master pays for itself

Master Tier is the only plan that changes what a group spends. One Master subscriber can share every book they own with up to 12 people. For a table of five where each player would otherwise buy the Player's Handbook, that is $119.96 of books for the other four against $54.99 for a year of Master (derived from the prices above). A player with no group gets unlimited characters from Hero, and may find the free six enough.

If you stop paying

D&D Beyond's FAQ says a canceled subscriber chooses six characters to keep and the rest are locked until they subscribe again, not deleted. The Drops library goes too. Books bought in the Marketplace are not part of the subscription, so canceling does not touch them. A 2024 App Store review describes arriving at a game to find every character frozen after canceling, because the account held more than six.

The privacy price

Apple's App Privacy panel for the D&D Beyond app lists eight data types that may be used to track you across other companies' apps and websites: purchases, location, contact info, user content, search history, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics. Google Play's data safety section says location, personal info and four other types may be shared with third parties.

What D&D Beyond does better

• It is the official rules, in full. Every book you buy is searchable, linked and readable offline in the app, and the character builder applies those rules for you. Initiative Tracker carries the SRD stat blocks and nothing else.
• It hosts a virtual tabletop for free. Maps runs a whole encounter on a shared map without a subscription. Ours has a player view of the turn order and no map.
• It runs everywhere one account goes: the website, iPhone, iPad and Android, with 92,534 App Store ratings and over five million Google Play downloads behind it.