Does the individual user "Hero" tier give access to all of the DND rules from all current and future rulebook sources? I know the basic unpaid does not.

No.

It only gives you what it says it gives you.

The non-free sourcebooks and extra options would need to be purchased separately on here as one-time purchases from the store. 

Alt 1: If you're in a campaign where others have purchased the content, one of you might consider a Master tier sub and enabling content sharing: sharing all purchased books and options anyone has with everyone else in the campaign.

Alt 2: If you have the physical books (and no you can't redeem them on here, before ya ask, this site is run by a separate company), and the time you can navigate the murky waters of the various homebrew tools to recreate character sheet options for public use - you cannot publically share these, but if you're in a campaign they will be shared with everyone automatically, no subs needed.

Thank you. I do not have the physical books myself. I'm looking for a cost effective way to access them online legitimately. The books are $50 each, so as a non-DM player that's a minimum of $150.

The description of the membership tiers do not address what rules sources are available with just the DnDBeyond subscription.

Alt2: I know this site is not run by Wizards. :)

Alt1: I think I'll bring that up at our next game session. Maybe we can all chip in for it.

The subscriptions don't unlock any content. The full digital books here are only $30, not $50, and you can buy options piecemeal as well which will discount from whichever book it was from.

If you're going to run a campaign here really all you need is someone with a Master Tier subscription and the PHB shared to make characters, the DM would benefit greatly from the Monster Manual as well.

Quote from jkaplanME >>

Thank you. I do not have the physical books myself. I'm looking for a cost effective way to access them online legitimately. The books are $50 each, so as a non-DM player that's a minimum of $150.

The description of the membership tiers do not address what rules sources are available with just the DnDBeyond subscription.

Alt2: I know this site is not run by Wizards. :)

Alt1: I think I'll bring that up at our next game session. Maybe we can all chip in for it.

 
I have found D&D Beyond to be the best value for money for my needs. A book is usually cheaper or similar in price to getting it physically from big places like Amazon, except on here you also get the bells and whistles like automatic options for character sheets, encounter building tools, and the ability to look up anything very easily. There are other places like VTTs such as Roll20 which offer similar but I find their systems a pain to use and horribly formatted. On here you get the book to read in a very easy way, plus all the special features.

If there's a book where you find it interesting to get but it doesn't have any character sheet options you'd want to use: get the Compendium-Only version at lower price - lowest you'll find anywhere.

If there's a book where you only want a few of the options - buy those piecemeal instead.

Anything paid towards a book for part of the content will discount off the main price (and in turn discount any bundles that book would be included in).

These part-purchases gives you much more flexibility in budgeting. 

D&D Beyond is one of the cheapest places to get the books and their character sheet is one of the best I've found. It is not perfect, not everything is automated, but it's still one of the best, in my opinion. If you want to use a VTT like Roll20 or Foundry for making maps and moving tokens around and all that, there is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome called Beyond20. It's 3rd party but really good: you can use your D&D Beyond character sheet or monster or whatever and you click on here, and it will roll or display into the VTT. I think somebody has also made a browser extension that is like a VTT as well to work with D&D Beyond. 

The downsides of the D&D beyond are the homebrew tools can be cumbersome to use at times and are limited in really annoying ways when trying to make something that isn't a reflavoured version of something official. Unless you're big into homebrewing 'out there' stuff, though, it's fine. Some things even official aren't always implemented into the automation right away and devs are slow to rectify this (they're working hard, they're just really busy and spread very thing already). So sometimes you might have to make workarounds. For example there's no "temporary effects" management like if you cast Mage Armor your AC won't change, but a workaround is manually editing your AC or making a homebrew magic item to serve as an easy "toggle": equip to apply changes, unequip to remove them. There's quite a lot you can do as manual ad-hoc customisations directly on the sheet, so that can get you very far. While not as convenient as normal automation, it's still far better than pen and paper.