Microsoft is killing Copilot's free Deep Research and Podcasts today, and the replacement costs $20 a month

What's actually being retired, today

Microsoft's own support pages confirm the date plainly: Deep Research and Podcasts in Microsoft Copilot both retire on 18 August 2026. Both features shipped only in April 2025, at Microsoft's 50th-anniversary event, so they're being cut after roughly 16 months. They're not being retired alone. TechCrunch reported the same wave also removes Group Chat, the experimental Copilot Labs features, and Mico, Copilot's animated on-screen companion, all part of a consumer-app-to-business-app merger ahead of a planned unified "Super App." An internal Microsoft memo quoted by TechCrunch has EVP Jacob Andreou framing it directly: features need to "earn the right to exist," and the company is "moving on from features that didn't work."

Deep Research: not deleted, but now behind a paywall

The good news first: Microsoft's support page is explicit that existing Deep Research reports are not deleted. What happens to them depends on your plan. Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers keep their reports accessible inside the new Researcher feature. Everyone else keeps access only through ordinary Copilot chat history, not as a clean, standalone report view. After today, nobody without Premium can generate a new Deep Research-style report at all.

If you have reports worth keeping, do this now: open each one individually in Copilot, use the "open in Word" option, and save the resulting document somewhere of your own, OneDrive or local disk. There's no bulk-export tool. It's one report at a time, and once today ends, non-Premium users lose the clean report interface entirely.

Podcasts: actually deleted, and the "no export" headlines are half right

Podcasts is the harsher cut. Microsoft's support page states plainly that after today, "previously created podcasts will no longer be available," and any links you shared to a Copilot-generated podcast episode break too. Several outlets ran headlines calling this a "no export option" shutdown. That's an overstatement in one specific way worth knowing: Microsoft's own support documentation says you can download individual episodes from Copilot on the web, one at a time, via the Download option in each episode's menu, before the cutoff. What genuinely doesn't exist is a bulk-export tool, and the download option is web-only as far as documented, so if you only ever used Copilot's mobile app, check the web version today before episodes disappear for good.

Researcher: a real upgrade, priced like one

Researcher isn't just Deep Research with a new name behind a paywall, though it is partly that. Per Microsoft's own "Get started with Researcher" documentation, it pulls from both the open web and your actual Microsoft 365 content, emails, calendar, files, Teams chats and meetings, which Deep Research never did. It's built to take more time on multi-step reasoning and produces structured, citation-backed reports with sections and visuals meant to be shared or presented, and it has gained Claude model support (admin-enabled) since Deep Research's original release. For someone with real work data to mine, that's a genuine capability jump.

For a reader whose only use case was "generate a cited report from the open web," though, that exact job is what Deep Research already did for free, capped at roughly 5 reports a month. Locking the whole capability behind $19.99/month Microsoft 365 Premium, with no smaller free tier surviving, is the part driving most of the pushback in tech coverage, more so than the feature upgrade itself.

The free alternatives, and how they actually compare

Coverage of this retirement has leaned harder on the digital-ownership angle around Podcasts than on defending Deep Research, and the reason becomes obvious once you look at what's already free elsewhere. Gemini Notebook ships its own Deep Research feature at 10 reports a month on the free tier, with paid tiers going up to 20-200 a day depending on plan. Its free Audio Overview allowance runs around 3 a day, no Premium subscription required.

That comparison isn't just theoretical. Beebom ran a hands-on test of Copilot Podcasts against Gemini Notebook's Audio Overviews before this shutdown and rated NotebookLM ahead on every axis it tested: longer episodes (roughly 20 minutes versus Copilot's 4), more natural back-and-forth pacing between the two AI hosts versus what the review called Copilot's "robotic" scripted-briefing tone, downloadable output with adjustable playback speed, none of which Copilot Podcasts offered even before today. If audio-format research summaries were the appeal of Copilot Podcasts, Gemini Notebook was arguably already doing the same job better, for free, before Microsoft pulled the plug.

What to do today, in order

1. If you have Deep Research reports you care about, open each one in Copilot and use "open in Word" to save it locally. Do this before end of day.
2. If you have Copilot Podcast episodes you want to keep, go to Copilot on the web (not necessarily the mobile app), open your podcast library, and use the Download option on each episode individually. There's no bulk tool, so budget time for this if you have several.
3. If you were using Group Chat with others, save any files or images shared by other participants now; content from other people in the chat becomes inaccessible once the app merge completes, though your own messages persist as ordinary 1:1 Copilot conversations.
4. Decide whether $19.99/month for Microsoft 365 Premium is worth it for Researcher's workplace-data integration, or whether a free tool that already covers the same job, like Gemini Notebook's Deep Research and Audio Overviews, fits your actual use case better.

When exactly does Copilot Deep Research stop working?

18 August 2026. After that date, no new Deep Research reports can be generated without a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription or a Microsoft 365 Copilot business add-on license.

Will my existing Copilot Deep Research reports be deleted?

No, they aren't deleted, but access depends on your plan. Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers can view them in the new Researcher feature; everyone else retains them only inside ordinary Copilot chat history, not as a clean report. Export anything you need to a Word document today.

Can I save my Copilot Podcast episodes before they're deleted?

Yes, individually. Microsoft's support page confirms you can download each episode from Copilot on the web using the Download option in its menu, but there's no bulk-export tool, and the mobile app isn't confirmed to support this, so use the web version and start today.

What is Researcher, and how is it different from Deep Research?

Researcher is Microsoft's replacement for Deep Research, available only with Microsoft 365 Premium ($19.99/month) or a business Copilot add-on. Unlike Deep Research, it can pull from your actual Microsoft 365 content (email, calendar, files, Teams) in addition to the open web, and produces longer, more structured reports.

What are good free alternatives to Copilot Deep Research and Podcasts?

Gemini Notebook offers a comparable free Deep Research feature (roughly 10 reports/month) and free Audio Overviews (roughly 3/day), which an independent hands-on comparison rated ahead of Copilot Podcasts even before this shutdown.