Davis Drug Guide app cost, the subscription price and which version to buy

The Davis's Drug Guide app costs $39.99 a year. It is published by F.A. Davis and sold through Unbound Medicine as "Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses". You download it free, get the complete guide for 14 days, and then Apple charges $39.99 for a one-year subscription unless you turn auto-renew off at least 24 hours before the trial ends. The subscription also unlocks DrugGuide.com, the web version, so one payment covers your phone and a desktop browser. We read that on the US App Store in October 2026, along with five other ways to buy the same content.

Those other routes range from $39.95 for web access alone to $199.99 for a bundle, and the print book sits in between. Which one you should pay for depends on whether you need the app at the bedside, a broader nursing library, or a book you can annotate for school. If you are a nurse practitioner, there is a second question underneath the first, which is whether a nursing drug guide is the right tool for prescribing at all. We cover both.

Davis Drug Guide prices compared

Two things stand out. The App Store price and the drugguide.com App + Web price are the same $39.99 for the same product, so buy wherever your receipts are easiest. If an employer, school or CME allowance reimburses you, an invoice from the vendor's own store is usually easier to submit than an App Store receipt. And web access alone costs four cents less than the app with web access included, so there is no reason to buy web only unless you cannot install apps on your work device.

What $39.99 a year buys

The app holds more than 1,700 monographs covering over 5,000 trade and generic names, written by April Hazard Vallerand, PhD, RN, and Cynthia A. Sanoski, PharmD. Each monograph is organized the way a nurse uses it: what to assess before you give the drug, how to administer it, what to watch for afterward, and what to teach the patient and family. Adverse effects are listed by frequency and by how dangerous they are, and Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies are highlighted where they apply.

The app adds things the paperback cannot. Pill images let you confirm a tablet before you hand it over. Audio pronunciations help with new drug names. IV calculators for drips and dosing are built into the entries, and regular updates bring in new FDA approvals and prescribing changes through the year. You can highlight entries, add notes, mark favorites, and get a Drug of the Week alert. There are separate indexes for pharmacology class, natural and herbal products, combination drugs and Canadian trade names, plus an immunization appendix for routine pediatric and adult schedules.

For the money, that is a lot of reference. It is also clearly a nursing reference, and that matters when you decide what else you need.

How the 14-day trial and renewal work

The trial is generous because it is the whole product, not a sample. For 14 days you see every monograph and every tool. On day 14 Apple charges $39.99 unless auto-renew was switched off at least 24 hours earlier, and the subscription then renews every year on the same terms.

What happens if you stop paying is the unusual part. Unbound states that if you choose not to renew, you can still use the app, but you no longer receive medication updates. So a lapsed subscription leaves you with a frozen edition rather than an empty screen. That is perfectly usable for study. As the only drug reference you rely on at work it gets riskier every month, because new approvals, boxed warnings and dosing changes stop arriving.

Practical advice: if you are evaluating it, put a reminder on day 12. If you are keeping it, let it renew, because the updates are the main thing the annual fee pays for.

App, web, bundle or print, which to buy

A practicing nurse who needs answers at the bedside should buy the $39.99 app. Pill images and IV calculators are the features you will use most, and both live in the app.

A nursing student is often told to buy the print book, and many programs list it as a required text. If your school allows it, the app is cheaper than the $60.75 paperback and stays current. Group discounts are available for schools and universities, so check with your program before paying list price. For course prep, many students and nurse educators also turn pharmacology lecture slides into a practice quiz and drill drug classes that way, with the Davis monograph open to check each answer.

Someone who wants a broader nursing library should compare the two bundles. Nursing Central at $199.99 puts the drug guide inside a set of nursing references, with renewals at $99.95. Medicine Central at $169.99 pairs it with the 5 Minute Clinical Consult, which we price in our guide to the 5 Minute Clinical Consult app cost. Both bundles renew at about $100, so the second year is cheaper than the first. If you mostly want the Washington Manual, Unbound also sells it bundled with Davis's Drug Guide for $99.99, $20 more than the manual alone, as covered in our Washington Manual app breakdown.

Hospitals, pharmacies and agencies buying for a team should ask Unbound for group pricing rather than reimbursing individual App Store purchases. drugguide.com states that group discounts are available for schools, universities, hospitals, pharmacies, government agencies and companies.

Is Davis's Drug Guide enough for a nurse practitioner who prescribes

For administration, yes. For prescribing, it was not built for that job, and the gap is specific. A Davis monograph tells you how to give a drug safely and what to monitor. It does not take the patient's whole medication list and tell you which of the twelve drugs interacts with the one you are about to add. It does not take an eGFR of 34 and return the adjusted dose. It does not check the new drug against the conditions on the problem list or the documented allergies. Those checks are the ones that catch prescribing errors, and in a drug guide you run them by hand, one monograph at a time.

That is the gap other references fill in different ways. Prescriber-oriented drug references such as Lexidrug at $29.99 a month, explained in our Lexidrug subscription cost guide, or epocrates+ at $179.99 a year, go deeper on dosing and interactions, but they are still references you query. Our roundup of the best drug reference app for each role lays out which one suits which clinician, and the drug interaction checker for nurse practitioners guide goes through the checkers NPs actually use.

Prescriber.io takes a different approach. You enter the patient's medications, conditions, allergies and kidney and liver function once, and it returns the interaction, contraindication and renal and hepatic dosing checks together in one card, each with a cited source, through the contraindication checker. It is decision support for licensed clinicians: you review every flag and you sign. It does not replace a nursing drug guide, and it does not try to. Many NPs keep Davis for administration questions and use a prescribing check for the prescription itself, at $24 a clinician a month billed annually on our pricing page.

Where to buy Davis's Drug Guide

Buy the app from the US App Store listing published by Unbound Medicine, titled "Davis's Drug Guide - Nurses", or buy App + Web directly on drugguide.com, which links through to Unbound's store. The two in-app purchases on the App Store listing, "Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses" and "Davis's Drug Guide Subscription", are both $39.99. The print edition is sold by F.A. Davis and by campus and online bookstores, where the list price is $60.75 and used or rental copies often sell for less. Avoid buying an older edition for clinical use, since the content is a few years behind.

If an IV question is what sent you looking, note that Davis's IV calculators handle rates and doses, not Y-site compatibility. For that you need a dedicated source, compared in our IV compatibility checker guide.