Microsoft retires free Copilot features and puts Deep Research behind a paywall

What changed and when

Microsoft has retired a batch of free features from its consumer Copilot app, with the changes taking effect on 18 August. According to a report on dev.to, the features being removed are Group Chat, AI-generated Podcasts, Deep Research, the experimental Copilot Labs and Mico, an animated assistant character. Free chat and image generation are unaffected.

The retirement runs alongside a bigger consolidation: Microsoft is merging its consumer Copilot app with the business-oriented Microsoft 365 Copilot app into a single application. Per the dev.to report, the mobile and web versions have already been unified, and the Windows and Mac desktop apps are expected to follow in mid-September. TechCrunch, cited by the report, described the cuts as Microsoft abandoning several AI features that failed to gain traction — a candid framing for tools the company shipped only recently.

Deep Research becomes a paid capability

The most consequential change concerns Deep Research, which could take a single prompt and produce an extended, source-cited report. It has not vanished so much as relocated. Its successor, Researcher, is available only to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers, a plan reported at $19.99 per month, according to the dev.to write-up, which draws on Microsoft's support documentation. Free-tier users can no longer start new deep research tasks at all.

Existing reports are preserved rather than deleted: Premium subscribers can reach them through Researcher, Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers can open earlier reports from their chat history, and any report can be saved to Word. The documentation is clear about where old content lives — but the capability itself now sits behind a subscription.

Removed features came with a manual rescue deadline

The features cut outright rather than paywalled carried their own catch: users had to save their content by hand before the deadline. For Podcasts, Microsoft's support page says that after 18 August users can no longer create or access them, and the only way to keep episodes was to download them one at a time from the library before the cut-off. There was no bulk export.

Group Chat followed the same pattern. Microsoft says group-chat threads, messages and images created in those chats will not carry over, and it advised users to copy any messages into a document and download any images themselves ahead of the deadline.

The dev.to report points out the asymmetry: Microsoft can automatically migrate standalone Copilot files to OneDrive, yet offered no equivalent one-click export for podcasts, leaving users responsible for preserving their own content with manual tools on a clock many may not have noticed.

Consolidation is the industry norm right now

There is a reasonable case for the overhaul. Microsoft genuinely had two confusingly similar apps, and merging them simplifies things for users. In July, according to reporting on an internal memo, the executive who oversees Copilot said the app needed to earn "the right to exist" in customers' lives — language consistent with a product being pruned. Peers are moving the same way: Anthropic has folded separate capabilities into its main Claude app, and OpenAI has pulled standalone tools back into ChatGPT. Some feature attrition during a merge is normal, and keeping a rarely used free feature alive carries a real cost.

Why it matters

The objection that survives the consolidation argument is about who bears the cost. When a clean-up deletes the novelties but paywalls the single most useful free capability, it reads less like tidying up and more like shifting value to the paying tier. Free Copilot users did not get a slower or limited research tool; they lost it entirely, along with an invitation to subscribe.

The export story matters beyond Copilot. Content created inside AI apps lives at the mercy of the product roadmap, and here the exit path was manual, item-by-item and time-boxed. As the major labs consolidate their consumer offerings, users of free AI tools should expect two things: high-value features drifting behind subscriptions, and save-your-data deadlines attached to whatever gets cut.