Vendors gave a median 48 days' warning before changing what customers use

Vendors gave a median 48 days' warning before changing what customers use

Between 20 September and 5 October our desk published 75 items on vendor lifecycle changes. Thirty-five were not vendor changes at all: 16 were regulation, grant or government items the filter caught, and 19 were acquisitions, a breach, a CVE, launches or promotions. That leaves 40 in which a supplier retired, repriced, metered or switched off something customers already used. Only 27 of the 40 give both the day the vendor said so and the day the change first bites; for those the median gap is 48 days. Twelve gave 31 days or less, five gave 14 days or less, and three gave a week or less.

The shortest was none. On 2 October GitHub deprecated four Copilot models, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Kimi K2.7 Code and Claude Opus 4.7, on the day it announced it, so any workflow pinned to one of them was broken by the announcement itself (our item). The longest was Microsoft's Project Online, announced on 5 September 2025 and switched off on 30 September 2026, 390 days later (our item). We still ran it on 21 September and again on 30 September, because a year's notice is not the same as being ready.

Notice ran from 0 to 390 days, and the habit belongs to the vendor

Across all 40 dated changes the median is 92.5 days, but one batch inflates it. By sender it is clearer:

Vendor	Dated changes	Median notice	Range
GitHub	3	4 days	0 to 31
Google	5	28 days	0 to 520
Microsoft	7	90 days	9 to 390
OpenAI and Anthropic	5	97 days	31 to 184
AWS	11	365 days	30 to 366

AWS is the generous outlier, and it is one habit. Eight of its nine end-of-support dates in our items sit exactly a year after the announcement: five services on its list of services in sunset, announced on 7 October 2025 and ending on 7 October 2026 (our item), and three more announced on 29 September with end dates on 29 and 30 September 2027 (our item). The ninth, the Infrastructure Composer console, gets 69 days. Bedrock's Nova Canvas and Reel went Legacy on 30 March and end on 30 September, with no replacement named (our item).

GitHub is at the other end. The Copilot removal of 19 October had 31 days (our item). The four models of 2 October had none. The macOS 14 runner image, retiring on 2 November, fails jobs on purpose in brownouts that begin four days after the 1 October notice (our item). A fourth item, the CodeQL bundle, goes in mid-March 2027 with no day given, so it is not counted (our item).

The nine dated AI model retirements have a median of 61 days and run from 0 to 184. The six-month cases are OpenAI's Videos API and Sora 2, notified on 24 March for removal on 24 September (our item), and three more OpenAI models removed on 1 April 2027 after a 1 October notice (our item). Anthropic gave 61 days for Claude Sonnet 4.5.

Two details change the reading. First, the first cutoff is rarely the last. Azure Communication Services closes to new customers on 23 October 2026, 31 days after the notice, but retires on 30 September 2028 (our item). Google's Backup and DR legacy console stops taking new backups for one group of databases on 31 July 2027, for another on 30 September 2027, and stops standard restores on 31 March 2028 (our item). Second, dates move: Microsoft pushed the Teams admin centre Device state rule retirement from late September to late October (our item), while Google says its Gemini 2.5 Vertex AI dates may be extended but never brought forward (our item).

Thirty-one of the forty arrived through a page nobody is paid to read

We coded each item by the source it cites. Sixteen rest on a changelog, release-notes page or update feed. Ten rest on a documentation, lifecycle or pricing page. Five are Microsoft Message Center posts, admin notices most of a company never sees. That is 31 of 40 with no press release or mailed notice in our records. Nine came as a vendor blog post, a keynote, a shutdown FAQ or a customer email, and only three of those point to a message sent to customers: Atlassian's customer notice of 28 August, OpenAI's email of March about the Videos API, and Trae's notice to existing subscribers.

We read public pages, and a vendor may also have emailed its admins. The claim is narrower: for 31 changes the only dated record an outsider can find is a page they must go and look at.

Some pages are weaker records. Fly.io's new price list, effective 1 October, carries no publication date, so we can say what changed but not when anyone was told (our item). Google describes the same Gemini 2.5 models two ways: the Gemini API says they "are not deprecated", Vertex AI retires them on 20 October 2026.

Five items moved customers towards a meter, and three of them left no choice

Five of the 40 changes introduced or extended usage-based billing. Atlassian meters Rovo credits, automation steps and AI agent resolutions from 3 December, announced on 1 September, and separately raises cloud list prices on 13 October by 3% to 10%, as its partners relay it (our item). Meta charges per message for WhatsApp Business service messages from 1 October, free since November 2024, with 1,000 free a month per number (our item). Cloudflare begins billing for Artifacts on 15 October, 14 days after saying so, ending the free part of its open beta (our item).

Those three arrive without a choice; the other two are softer. Microsoft's Copilot pricing puts usage limits on the per-user licence and moves newer agent features to credits, but enterprise billing stays off until an admin creates a spending policy; Microsoft gave no limit figures and no credit price (our item). Cloudflare opened Logpush to Free, Pro and Business plans at 25 GB included, then 3 cents per gigabyte for internal destinations and 10 cents for external ones, while Enterprise contracts keep their pricing through renewal (our item). A protection that lasts until renewal is itself a date.

A related cluster meters nothing but takes value away at the same price. Trae cut existing subscribers' monthly allowance from $90 to $60 on Pro+ and $400 to $200 on Ultra, with prices held at $30 and $100. OpenAI halved ChatGPT Pro 200's included usage from 20 times to 10 times the Plus allowance from 30 October at an unchanged $200, and added a $500 plan. Twilio may cap US message throughput over the Black Friday and holiday weeks, 19 November to 4 January (our item). Three items raised a price outright: Atlassian, Fly.io, whose extra memory goes to $6 per GB a month from 1 October, and Windows 10 Extended Security Updates, which doubles from $61 to $122 a device in year two and to $244 in year three (our item).

Seven items took something away without offering an equivalent

Four say outright that nothing like-for-like replaces what is going. OpenAI's 30 November removals cover prompts, evaluations and the agent builder, with no drop-in replacement of its own. Microsoft's Exchange Web Services timeline lists capabilities that will never come to Microsoft Graph, among them generic public-folder operations and legacy Discovery Mailbox access (our item). Azure Communication Services, retiring in 2028, has no standalone equivalent for call recording or audio streaming. And Google's Backup and DR move, for Oracle, Db2 and SAP HANA, replaces a console with different backup mechanisms, not an upgrade.

Three more name no replacement: Nova Canvas and Reel, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which ended on 29 September (our item), and Mozilla's Solo website builder, which will delete sites and data on 30 November. Solo's export is static HTML, not a working site (our item).

Seven of 40 is 17.5%, and a floor: an item that says nothing about replacement is not coded, and others swap a function for a different product, as Teams device alerts do by moving to a portal that does not import the old rules.

Microsoft is 13 of the 40, and Exchange Web Services is three of them

Seven vendors appear more than once. Microsoft has 13 items but 12 events, because our Project Online items of 21 and 30 September describe one retirement. Google has six, GitHub four, Cloudflare, OpenAI and AWS three each, Atlassian two. Eight vendors appear once: Fly.io, Trae, Shopify, Meta, Twilio, Mozilla, Anthropic and Pulley. GitHub is a Microsoft subsidiary, so by parent the figure is 17 of 40; we count it apart because it runs its own changelog. Two items cite two vendors, so vendor counts add to more than 40.

Exchange Web Services is the repeat that costs most attention. Three items, published within three days, cover it: the start of cross-tenant free/busy and calendar-sharing deprecation on 1 October (our item), the disablement that begins this month and is complete in April 2027 (our item), and the allow-list step of 10 October, after which an app missing from a list that Microsoft filled in from 60 days of activity can lose access (our item). A quarterly export job may not appear in 60 days of traffic.

The calendar of cutoffs, now to mid-2027

Every row is a date recorded in one of our items, and "mid" or "late" is shown where the source gave no day. Of 40 rows, 16 fall in the next 30 days and 31 by the end of 2026; 15 are in October alone.

Date	What happens	Source
7 October 2026	AWS: WAF Classic, Proton, Greengrass V1, FinSpace, Lookout for Equipment end of support	item
10 October 2026	Microsoft: Exchange apps off the EWS allow list can lose access	item
13 October 2026	Atlassian cloud list prices rise	item
13 October 2026	Microsoft: Windows 11 24H2 Home and Pro, Server 2012 ESU year 3 and Server 2022 mainstream support end	item
14 October 2026	Microsoft: Windows 10 ESU year two, $122 a device	item
15 October 2026	Cloudflare Artifacts billing starts	item
Mid-October 2026	Microsoft: SharePoint one-time passcode and Page Agent retirements start	item
19 October 2026	GitHub Copilot removes six models	item
20 October 2026	Google: Gemini 2.5 models retire on Vertex AI	item
23 October 2026	OpenAI: twelve legacy snapshots and their fine-tunes removed	item
23 October 2026	Microsoft: Azure Communication Services closes to new customers	item
Late October 2026	Microsoft: Teams Device state rule and health alerts retire	item
29 October 2026	AWS: Chime SDK SIP and WorkSpaces Secure Browser close to new customers	item
30 October 2026	OpenAI: ChatGPT Pro 200 allowance halved	item
30 October 2026	AWS: Amazon Pinpoint end of support	item
2 November 2026	GitHub: Actions macOS 14 runner retired (brownouts from 5 October)	item
10 November 2026	Microsoft: Azure Functions ends .NET 8, .NET 9 and PowerShell 7.4	item
19 November 2026	Twilio: US throughput limits start, to 4 January 2027	item
Late November 2026	Microsoft: Purview DSPM classic retirement begins	item
30 November 2026	Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 retires	item
30 November 2026	Mozilla Solo: sites and data deleted	item
30 November 2026	OpenAI: prompts API, evaluations and agent builder removed	item
30 November 2026	Pulley: Carta opt-in deadline	item
1 December 2026	OpenAI: an image model generation retires	item
3 December 2026	Atlassian: AI credits, automation steps and agent resolutions metered	item
7 December 2026	AWS: Infrastructure Composer console ends	item
8 December 2026	Pulley shuts down	item
11 December 2026	OpenAI: six more snapshots removed	item
13 December 2026	Google: Gemini 2.5 native-audio model retires on Vertex AI	item
16 December 2026	Microsoft: 365 companion apps retire	item
Late December 2026	Microsoft: Purview DSPM classic retirement complete	item
1 January 2027	Shopify: Admin API 2027-01 drops automaticDiscounts	item
6 January 2027	OpenAI: text-to-speech models removed	item
31 January 2027	Pulley: limited data access ends	item
Mid-March 2027	GitHub: all-platform CodeQL bundle removed; Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image retires	item
1 April 2027	OpenAI: three models removed	item
April 2027	Microsoft: Exchange Web Services fully disabled	item
30 April 2027	Microsoft: Azure Functions ends Node.js 22	item
17 May 2027	Atlassian: legacy Jira Forge dashboard modules removed	item
Early July 2027	Microsoft: EWS allow-list rollout completes	item

Later: 31 July 2027 (Backup and DR, older databases); 29 and 30 September 2027 (AWS Managed Blockchain, Backint Agent, DevOps Guru; Backup and DR); second half of 2027 (Googlebook management; item); 1 March 2028 (Cloud Service Mesh ISTIOD; item); 31 March 2028 (Backup and DR restores); 30 September 2028 (Azure Communication Services); mid-2034 (ChromeOS updates). Cloudflare's cloudflared cut-off for 32-bit Windows and Intel Macs says only "2027" (item).

Five checks that fall out of these 40 items

1. Watch the pages, not the inbox. Our items drew on the GitHub, Cloudflare, Shopify, Atlassian and Twilio changelogs, Azure Updates, Google Cloud and Gemini API release notes, AWS services-in-sunset, the OpenAI and Anthropic deprecations pages, Microsoft lifecycle pages and the Message Center. Those held 31 of the 40 changes.
2. Log the first and last dates separately. Azure Communication Services runs from a first cutoff on 23 October 2026 to a last one on 30 September 2028, and Backup and DR from 31 July 2027 to 31 March 2028; entering only the nearer date hides the project.
3. Search for pinned model names on announcement day. Notice ran from none to 184 days, so a monthly search of code, configuration and prompt tooling misses the short ones.
4. Get usage per seat before a meter or an allowance change starts. Atlassian automation steps, Trae's Dollar Usage, WhatsApp service messages per number and ChatGPT Pro's Codex use are cheaper to measure before the date. Ask in writing for allowances the vendor has not published; Atlassian and Microsoft had not.
5. Ask what is not replaced. Seven of 40 items remove a function with no like-for-like successor. Where a vendor names a destination, check what does not move: Teams rules, Graph gaps, call recording.

How we counted, and what the count cannot say

The data is our own: 75 items our desk published on this theme, dated 20 September to 5 October 2026. We coded each by hand against the item body and counted with a script. It excludes 35 items: 16 regulation, government programme, grant or portal-downtime items; nine acquisitions, listings and similar corporate deals; two security items (a breach and a CVE); and eight launches, promotions, new-model licences, additive entitlements and a faulty update. The remaining 40 change something a customer already used or held; two describe one event, so 39 distinct events.

For notice, we took the vendor's stated date, or the earliest in the item where its page was undated, to the first date customers lose something. Of 40 dated changes from 27 items, 35 use dates stated outright and five a derived one: Shopify's 1 January 2027 comes from its quarterly release schedule; the Vertex AI notice is Google's lifecycle-page update date; Nova uses the day the models went Legacy; Windows 10 ESU uses its page's last-updated date, so 331 days is a lower bound; Trae uses the 30-day rule in its examples. Thirteen items have no usable pair of dates and are outside the median, among them Fly.io, cloudflared, CodeQL, ChromeOS, Teams Events, EWS (set in 2023, month only), Solo and Google's legacy agents. The 27-item median of 48 days uses the shortest notice per item; per change it is 92.5 days, or 84 with the AWS batch counted once.

Limits: this counts what our desk published, which depends on what we read, and is not a sample of all vendor changes. It leans towards the vendors whose pages the desk reads daily. Channel coding records the source we cited, not every way a vendor told customers. We did not re-open vendor pages for this article, so every figure is as recorded in our items.

Sources

Our items are linked in the text and the table, plus three on dates already past or undated: Security Copilot, the Antigravity agent and Google's legacy agents. Primary pages they cite:

• GitHub Changelog, 2 October 2026
• Microsoft, Project Online lifecycle
• Microsoft, Ending support in 2026
• Microsoft, EWS deprecation in Exchange Online
• AWS, services in sunset
• AWS, Bedrock model lifecycle
• OpenAI API deprecations
• Anthropic model deprecations
• Google Cloud, Vertex AI model lifecycle
• Google Cloud, Backup and DR deprecations
• Atlassian, usage-based pricing
• Cloudflare changelog, Logpush pricing