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.
