Update: Relay.app is shutting down

Read this before anything else. On July 16, 2026, Relay.app told customers it is closing. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades were switched off the same day. Free accounts shut down on August 15, 2026; paying customers keep access until September 14, 2026, and all accounts and data are deleted after those dates.

The company gave no reason, and no acquisition has been reported. Paying customers on annual plans were cancelled immediately through Paddle with automatic prorated refunds, and during the wind-down paid users get a bonus of 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits a month. Your existing workflows keep running until your cut-off date, so nothing breaks overnight, but the clock is real.

Everything below describes what Relay.app was and does, because the review still helps you decide where to move. If you are here to plan an exit, skip to how to export and where to go.

What Relay.app was

Relay.app was a workflow automation platform in the Zapier and Make mould: connect apps, build a flow of triggers and actions, let it run. It carried over 100 integrations across the usual suspects (Gmail, Slack, Notion, and the rest) and put its AI actions front and centre, using GPT, Claude, and Gemini models for jobs like summarising, translating, and pulling structured data out of messy text.

What set it apart was not the connector count, which never rivalled the incumbents. It was the assumption baked into the product: that a lot of useful automation should pause and ask a person before it acts.

The human-in-the-loop idea

Most automation tools are fire-and-forget. Relay.app treated human judgement as a first-class step. You could drop an approval into the middle of a flow so that, say, an AI-drafted reply waited for a teammate to sign off before it sent, or a refund paused for a manager to approve. The workflow genuinely stopped, pinged a person, and resumed on their decision.

That is the honest highlight of this review, and worth naming plainly because it is what you should look for in a replacement. Plenty of tools bolt on a crude "wait for webhook" hack to fake approvals. Relay.app designed around them, with collaboration and sign-off as core building blocks rather than an afterthought. If your automations touch money, customers, or anything you would not let a bot do unsupervised, that design was the reason to use it.

Pricing before the wind-down

For the record, this is what Relay.app charged before signups closed. It metered usage in two currencies: steps (any single action, like sending an email) and AI credits (spent when a step calls a model).

• Free ($0): 200 steps and 500 AI credits a month.
• Professional (about $19/month): 750 steps and 5,000 AI credits.
• Team (about $69/month): 2,000 steps and 5,000 AI credits, plus shared workflows and multiple users.
• Enterprise: custom, with unlimited steps and dedicated support.

One nice touch: every plan included every integration. There was no paywall that hid a connector behind a higher tier, which is more than several bigger rivals can say. None of this is purchasable now, but it tells you the price band a replacement needs to hit.

How to export and where to go

Export first. Relay.app lets you download workflows, Sequences, MCP servers, and AI prompts as JSON, and Tables as CSV. Do this before your account's shutdown date, because everything is deleted afterward with no recovery. Save the run history too if you rely on it for audit.

Then pick a new home based on what you actually used Relay.app for:

• You valued the approval steps: look for tools with real human-in-the-loop support. Make has approval and "wait" modules, and n8n can build approval gates with its Wait and webhook nodes.
• You want AI-heavy automation: n8n's native AI agent nodes or Activepieces' AI agents and MCP support cover that ground, and both can be self-hosted so you are not exposed to another sudden shutdown.
• You want the simplest like-for-like: Zapier is the safest, best-supported landing spot if ease of use mattered more than price.

The wider lesson: Relay.app closing with two months' notice is a reminder that a hosted automation tool can vanish. If that risk stings, an open-source, self-hostable platform removes it, because the software keeps running on your server no matter what the company does.

Verdict

Relay.app was a genuinely good product with a sharp idea, and human-in-the-loop automation is still underserved. But there is no version of "should you buy it" that ends well in August 2026: you cannot sign up, and any account you already have is weeks from deletion. Do not start anything new here.

If you are an existing user, export your data now and migrate. For approval-heavy workflows, move to Make or self-hosted n8n; for AI automation you want to control, Activepieces or n8n; for the gentlest transition, Zapier. Treat the closure as the push to land somewhere you own, rather than somewhere that can send you this same email again next year.