Microsoft Strips Copilot's Free Features — and Puts Deep Research Behind a Subscription

Open the Microsoft Copilot app this week and it may be missing a few things you used. As of 18 August, Microsoft began retiring a clutch of free consumer features — the standout being Deep Research, the tool that turned a prompt into a long, sourced report — while it folds its two Copilot apps into one. The most useful of them doesn’t vanish so much as move: the in-depth research successor now sits behind a paid Microsoft 365 plan.

Answer first, because the shape of the change matters more than the noise around it. This is partly sensible housekeeping and partly a paywall. Microsoft is merging its consumer Copilot app with the business-oriented Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and along the way it has cut Group Chat, AI-generated Podcasts, Deep Research, the experimental Copilot Labs and the animated Mico character. Free chat and image generation stay free. But Deep Research’s replacement, Researcher, is available only to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers — a plan reported at $19.99 a month — and the features that were simply removed came with a quiet save-or-lose deadline attached.

None of this is a scandal, and we’ll be fair about the good parts. But a change that turns a capable free tool into a paid one, and asks users to rescue their own content by hand before a date many won’t have clocked, is worth reading slowly.

What Microsoft actually switched off

The umbrella move is a merge. Microsoft is combining the consumer-facing Copilot app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot business app into a single application, with mobile and web already unified and the Windows and Mac desktop apps following in mid-September. As TechCrunch reported, the company is also “ditching a number of unsuccessful AI features” in the process — an unusually frank admission that some of what it shipped over the past year didn’t land.

Per Microsoft’s own support documentation, the consumer features going away by 18 August are Group Chat, Podcasts, Deep Research, Copilot Labs and Mico, the floating animated character that reviewers had already compared to an AI-era Clippy. Reasonable people can wave most of that goodbye without a tear. Mico was a novelty; Labs was explicitly experimental; a “group chat with an AI” feature was never going to be load-bearing. If the story ended there, it would be a tidy-up, and we’d call it one.

The one that matters: Deep Research goes paid

It doesn’t end there, because one of the retired features was genuinely useful and free. Deep Research compiled long, sourced reports from the web — the kind of multi-step research task that is among the more valuable things a consumer AI can do. Microsoft’s support page is plain about what replaces it: “Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers can continue creating detailed reports and analyses using Researcher in Copilot.” For everyone else, the ability to run new deep research is simply gone.

Credit where it’s due, and there is some. Your existing reports are not deleted: Premium subscribers reach them through Researcher, Personal and Family subscribers can open previous reports from their chat history, and any report can be saved to Microsoft Word. That is a materially gentler landing than a hard delete, and Microsoft documented it clearly rather than letting people discover the loss cold. We’ll take honest documentation over a silent removal any day.

But strip the reassurances back and the load-bearing fact remains: a research capability that used to cost nothing now costs a subscription. This is the flat-to-paid drift in its cleanest form — not a price rise on a thing you were buying, but a thing you had for free being moved to the far side of a paywall, dressed as a product improvement. The reader on the free tier didn’t get a worse Deep Research; they got no Deep Research, and an invitation to pay $19.99 a month for its successor.

The save-or-lose deadline

The features that were removed rather than paywalled came with a catch that’s easy to miss in the announcement. Take Podcasts. Microsoft says that after 18 August, customers can “no longer… create or access Podcasts in Copilot,” and that the way to keep any was to “download individual podcasts from your podcast library using the download option” — one at a time, before the cut-off. There was no bulk export. If you had a library of AI-generated episodes and didn’t hear about the change in time, they are now inaccessible in the app.

Group Chat is the same pattern. Microsoft’s support page states that group-chat threads, messages and content — including images created in those chats — “will not be carried forward” after 18 August, and advises users to “copy any messages you want to keep into a document or notes app and download any images you want to save” beforehand. The burden of preservation is placed squarely on the user, on a deadline, with manual tools.

To be scrupulously fair, this is not deletion of your personal files, and Microsoft did give notice. But “we told you, and you had a window to save each item individually” is a low bar for content a product encouraged you to create inside it. It’s the difference between a shop that helps you carry your things out and one that leaves the boxes by the kerb and tells you the skip arrives Tuesday. The now-familiar move of charging to undo a limitation has a quieter cousin here: making the free thing disappear unless you do the work to keep it.

The steel-man: consolidation is real, and some of this needed doing

Here is the strongest case for the defence, and it’s a decent one. Microsoft genuinely had a mess: two Copilot apps with overlapping names and confusing boundaries, a consumer version and a business version that most users couldn’t tell apart. Merging them into one is a pro-user simplification, not a cynical one. In July, per reporting on an internal memo, the executive who oversees Copilot said the app needed to earn “the right to exist” in customers’ lives — which is exactly the sort of ruthlessness a bloated product needs. Cutting Mico and Labs is that ruthlessness in action.

The wider context helps Microsoft too. Every big lab is consolidating: Anthropic has folded features into its main Claude app, OpenAI has pulled standalone tools back into ChatGPT. Feature attrition during a merge is normal, and keeping a rarely-used free feature alive forever has a real cost. A company is allowed to decide that Podcasts wasn’t worth maintaining. Concede all of it.

Why the objection survives the steel-man

Grant every point and the complaint just gets narrower and sharper. It isn’t “Microsoft simplified its apps.” It’s that the simplification’s costs fall on the free user in two specific ways. First, the single most valuable free capability — sourced, in-depth research — was the one moved behind the $19.99 plan, not the frippery. When a “clean-up” consistently paywalls the useful thing and merely deletes the toys, the pattern reads less like tidying and more like migrating value to the tier that pays.

Second, the export story is worse than it needed to be. A company that can migrate stand-alone Copilot files to OneDrive automatically could presumably have offered a one-click export of your podcasts, rather than a manual, episode-by-episode download on a deadline. The absence of a bulk export isn’t a law of physics; it’s a choice about how much effort to spend making leaving painless — and it’s the same choice that makes so many AI subscriptions easier to enter than to exit. We explore the deeper version of that problem — whether you have any right to extract your data and creations from an AI tool at all — in a companion piece, because it turns out the answer is murkier than “it’s your stuff.”

What to actually do

If you use Copilot, the practical steps are undramatic:

• Check what you’ve lost. If you relied on Deep Research, note that new in-depth reports now require a Microsoft 365 Premium plan; your old reports should still be in your chat history or saveable to Word.
• Rescue anything you care about now. Group chats and podcasts created before the change may already be inaccessible; if you find any still reachable, export them by hand while you can.
• Decide before you subscribe. $19.99 a month for Researcher may well be worth it if you do serious research — but treat it as a new purchase, not a restoration of something you were promised for free.
• Keep your own copies. The broad lesson of this fortnight is that a feature you build a habit around can be retired on a schedule. Download what matters instead of trusting it to live in someone else’s app.

Microsoft has done the un-glamorous work of simplifying a genuinely confusing product, and said out loud that some of its own features flopped — which is more honesty than most launches manage. The fixable fault is the shape of the trade it offered its free users: lose the toys, lose easy access to what you made, and pay to keep the one capability that was actually worth having. A merge that treated the free tier’s useful tools as worth preserving, and made leaving as smooth as arriving, would be the same clean-up without the aftertaste.