Tools 2026-08-19

The most capable free tool in Copilot was switched off yesterday. Its replacement costs $19.99 a month.

Microsoft retired Deep Research from the consumer Copilot app on 18 August. It was the most analytically capable thing on the free tier: you gave it a complicated question, it spent several minutes reading the web, and it came back with a structured report and its sources attached. The replacement, Researcher, is not on the free tier at all — it ships with Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month, and it is aimed at work, with the ability to search a company's own files alongside the open web. Two other free features went the same day. Podcasts, which turned documents and web pages into an audio discussion, is gone; so is Group Chat, whose threads, messages and images were not carried over at all, with Microsoft telling users to download anything they wanted to keep beforehand. Mico, the animated voice companion, is also leaving the core consumer experience. All of it arrives alongside a merge: the consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot become a single app, with account labels and a green shield marking a work account, and the web address moving from m365.cloud.microsoft to copilot.cloud.microsoft.

Why it mattersFree tiers were the land-grab phase, and this is what the end of one looks like from the user's side — not a price rise, but the quiet removal of the single feature that made the free product worth opening. Deep research is genuinely expensive to run: many minutes of model time and dozens of page fetches for one question, with no advertising attached. It was always going to be the first thing to move behind a subscription once growth stopped being the only goal. The thing to watch now is whether the others follow. OpenAI and Google both still give away a limited amount of deep research, and they now get to observe what happens to a user base when it is taken away.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

Apple Music will tell you when a song was made by a machine — but the uploader decides whether to say so
2026-08-21 Stripe has just paid $7.5 billion for a model router. Days later Ramp built one and is giving it away until January.
2026-08-21 Meta's assistant is now a Mac app that reads your screen and types into any window — and what it sees can train the model
2026-08-21 One click on a news site now tells Google to show you more of it — and you stay on the page you were reading
2026-08-21 Adobe will now generate the music, the voiceover and the door slam — and it says the licence covers you
2026-08-21

The most capable free tool in Copilot was switched off yesterday. Its replacement costs $19.99 a month.

Related stories