Academic Edition
Free — study, teaching & research
For students, trainees, researchers and academic staff, used under supervision. The whole application, nothing gated.
Download the Academic EditionFree for study, teaching and research
One file. Put it anywhere and double-click it — there is no installer, no admin right required, and nothing to sign in to.
For use under supervision, in training. Any prescription, administration, or recommendation for real clinical use must be made by a licensed healthcare professional. Read the intended use.
Not yet wired up. The download button has no release to point at.
Set
downloadUrl in site.js to the published
Rxference.exe — a GitHub release asset is the usual
answer — and this notice disappears.
Windows 10 & 11 · 64-bit
Rxference Academic Edition
Free for study, teaching and research. Includes the curated tier, the openFDA label corpus and the FDA mechanism graph.
Download Rxference.exeAlready downloaded? Register for academic license here
Version 1.0.0
Released
About 12.2 MB
No installer
No account
SHA-256 — verify before running:
There is not much to it
Save the file
Anywhere you like — Desktop, Documents, a USB stick. It is a single self-contained executable and writes nothing outside its own folder and your user profile.
Let Windows think
A new executable with no code-signing certificate gets a SmartScreen prompt. Choose More info then Run anyway. Verify the SHA-256 above first if you would rather be sure.
Pin it
It sits above whatever you are working in from the moment it opens. Collapse it to the ℞ pill when it is in the way; it reopens exactly where you left it.
Academic is free. Professional is coming.
The download on this page is the Academic Edition, and it is the whole application — nothing is held back or gated. The paid Professional Edition, for clinical practice, is in development.
Professional Edition
In development
For clinical practice: commercial licensing, multi-seat, custom formulary. Not built yet, and what it becomes depends on what people tell us they need.
Join the waitlistThere is no cut-down free edition. To try Rxference without installing anything, the demo is the real interface on the real data, in your browser. Compare the editions
Before you install it
Do I need to register to download it?
No. Nothing is gated behind the form. Registering issues you an academic license file, which is what makes the application read Licensed to… instead of Unlicensed, and it records the academic affiliation the free edition is offered on. The download itself is not conditional on it.
Is there a macOS or Linux build?
Not yet. The application is pure Python and tkinter with no third-party dependencies, so it runs on both from source; what does not exist yet is a packaged, tested build. The always-on-top and transparent-corner behaviour uses Windows APIs that need a platform-specific equivalent before a build would be honest.
Does it send anything anywhere?
Nothing you search for, ever. The database is a local file and there is no account, so drug names and search terms stay on your machine with no exceptions. There is no telemetry and no analytics of any kind.
It does check for updates — once a day at most, a request for a small signed file on this site, carrying no identifier and no information about you. Security fixes and small corrections install without asking and take effect the next time you open the app — new features are always offered to you first, and you can turn quiet installs off in settings. Every update, either way, is verified against a signature and a checksum before anything runs. More on that.
How current is the drug data?
Every database records the FDA export it was built from and the date it was downloaded, and the app shows both under ⚙ → About. It also records which version of our own processing rules produced it, so a database built under older rules can be spotted and rebuilt.
Got it running?
Register your academic license so we can keep the Academic Edition properly accounted for — it takes about a minute.