Free Relay.app Alternatives: Where to Go Before August 15
If you were on Relay.app’s free plan, your deadline is Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT — and your account and all of its data are permanently deleted at that moment. Paying customers get until September 14. Free users go first, by a full month, which as of today leaves about four weeks.
That ordering matters more than it looks. Free users are the largest group, they’re the least likely to have a migration budget, and they’re the ones whose workflows quietly hold together a side project or a two-person business. Nobody is sending you a Paddle refund email. Here’s where you can actually go, what each free tier really includes, and exactly where “free” stops on each one.
What’s happening to Relay.app
Relay.app announced it is winding down. From Relay’s own notice:
“Today we have difficult news to share: Relay.app will be shutting down on August 15, 2026 for free users and September 14, 2026 for paying customers.”
No reason was given, publicly or anywhere else, and we’re not going to invent one. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already switched off — so upgrading to buy yourself the extra month to September 14 is not an option. Existing workflows keep running until your deadline.
Before then, export everything. Relay lets you pull out your workflows, Sequences and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, your run history, and your Tables as CSVs. Be clear-eyed about what that is: no other automation tool ingests Relay’s JSON. It’s a rebuild aid — something to paste into an AI builder as a spec — not a portable artifact you import somewhere else. The CSVs are the genuinely portable part, so get your Tables out first. Deleting your account also deletes the stored credentials and tokens for every app you connected.
We cover the shutdown itself in more detail in Relay.app is shutting down. This post is only about the free-tier question: where do you go, and what does it cost you.
What Relay’s free plan actually gave you
Set the bar honestly before you shop. From Relay’s pricing page as of late June 2026, the free plan was:
| Relay.app Free | |
|---|---|
| Steps per month | 200 |
| AI credits per month | 500 |
| Workflows | 5 (2 active at once) |
| Concurrent runs | 2 |
| Run history | 30 days |
| AI builder messages | 20/day |
| Custom MCP servers / Sequences / Tables | 2 each |
| Users | 1 |
Two hundred steps a month is not a production tier. Relay’s own FAQ described the free plan as “the same as paid plans, with set lower limits for automation and AI usage, and limited to 1 user” — which is an accurate description of a trial tier. If you were running real volume on it, you were already brushing the ceiling.
But two things about it were genuinely generous, and they’re the things you’re most likely to miss:
- Every integration was free on every plan. All 200+ app connectors, no premium-connector gating. Zapier, by contrast, reserves premium apps — Salesforce, Shopify, QuickBooks Online, Xero, Zendesk among them — for paid plans only. If your Relay workflow touched Salesforce for free, that specific thing does not exist on Zapier’s free plan.
- Every human-in-the-loop feature was free on every plan. All four step types — Approvals, Get data input, task completions, and Path selection — were available to free users. This was Relay’s signature capability, and reviewers consistently named it the thing that distinguished it. Nothing else on this list replaces all four like-for-like. Read that as a real loss rather than something a competitor will quietly hand back.
Seven places free Relay users can go
1. Carly — free unlimited workflow steps, but the AI is not free
Carly’s answer to the 200-steps-a-month ceiling is direct: every node type except LLM runs free and unlimited. Triggers, tool calls across 200+ integrations, HTTP requests, branches, filters, foreach loops, waits, sub-workflows, actions — none of it is metered, and none of it needs a subscription. You only pay when a step calls a model. If your Relay workflows were mostly plumbing with a bit of AI on top, the plumbing costs nothing here.
Where free stops, plainly: there is no free tier for the AI assistant. Carly’s AI agents start at $35/month, and usage above that entry point sits in tiers. On a page titled “free alternatives” that boundary deserves to be stated flatly rather than buried: the free part is the non-AI workflow steps, full stop. If your Relay workflows leaned on those 500 AI credits, Carly is a paid move, not a free one.
What it doesn’t replace: Relay’s approval steps. Carly is a different shape — you email it what you want and it builds, tests and debugs the workflow rather than you dragging one together, and its Wait node can pause until a time, a reply, or an explicit resume. Drafts land in Drafts and it asks before sending. That is not the same as Relay’s first-class Approvals, Get-data-input and Path-selection steps, and we’re not going to pretend it is. Carly also doesn’t build or host MCP servers the way Relay let you — that capability has no equivalent here.
Best for: free Relay users whose step count was the binding constraint, who want the automation itself to cost nothing and are willing to pay for the AI part.
Pricing: Free, unlimited Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month
2. Activepieces — the closest thing to a free production tier
Activepieces restructured its pricing away from counting tasks. The cloud free plan now gives you 10 active flows with unlimited runs — no monthly task ceiling — plus AI agents, MCP servers, tables and 1 seat. Beyond 10, it’s $5 per active flow per month. Against Relay’s 5 workflows / 2 active / 200 steps, that’s more headroom on every axis that was pinching you.
It’s also genuinely open source: the self-hosted community edition is MIT licensed (core features only), so you can run it yourself with no usage limits and no license asterisk. Among the tools here, MIT is the most permissive license on offer.
The catch: the connector catalog is smaller than Zapier’s or Make’s, and the “unlimited runs” model means the pricing pressure moves to how many flows you keep switched on — consolidating logic into fewer, bigger flows is rewarded.
Best for: free Relay users who want to stay free and actually run production volume.
Pricing: Free for 10 active flows; $5/active flow/month after; self-hosted free (MIT)
3. Make — the most generous conventional free tier
Make’s free plan gives you 1,000 credits/month, 2 active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum interval between runs, 512MB of data transfer, and access to all 3,000+ apps with no premium gating. That’s 5× Relay’s step budget, and the no-gating stance matches what you liked about Relay.
The visual builder is the closest spiritual match to Relay’s canvas, which matters if you’re rebuilding from those exported JSON specs by hand. The tradeoffs: 2 active scenarios is the same squeeze Relay had, the 15-minute floor rules out anything near-real-time, and Make is meaningfully harder to learn than Relay was — ease of use was Relay’s most-praised quality, and you will feel the change.
Where free stops: the Core plan is $12/month for 10,000 credits.
Best for: people who want the most monthly runs for $0 and don’t need sub-15-minute reactions. More options in Make alternatives.
Pricing: Free (1,000 credits/mo); Core from $12/month
4. n8n — free if you run the server, not free if you don’t
n8n has no free cloud tier — cloud is a trial, then €20/month for Starter (2,500 executions, unlimited steps, billed annually). The free path is self-hosting the Community Edition, and it’s the best-value option here by a distance: unlimited executions, unlimited workflows, every integration, capped only by your server.
Two honest caveats. First, the license: n8n is not OSI open source. It’s “fair-code” under the Sustainable Use License, which n8n coined precisely because, in its own words, “open source licenses can’t include limitations on use, so we do not call ourselves open source.” You may use it for your own internal business purposes — you may not sell it as a service. For a solo operator or a small team automating your own work, that’s fine. Read it before you build a business on it.
Second, self-hosting is real work: a VPS, Docker, updates, backups, and you are the on-call engineer when a workflow dies at 2am. That’s the actual price of “free,” and it’s a poor trade if you came to Relay because you’re a non-technical business user — which most Relay users were.
Best for: technically comfortable users with volume that would be expensive anywhere else. See n8n alternatives and free, open-source n8n alternatives.
Pricing: Self-hosted free (Sustainable Use License); cloud from €20/month billed annually
5. Zapier — the biggest catalog, the thinnest free plan
Zapier’s free plan is 100 tasks/month, two-step Zaps only, 15-minute polling, 1 seat, and — the part that stings — premium apps are paid-only. Two steps means trigger plus one action: no filters, no paths, no branching. Most Relay workflows were more than two steps, so most of them will not fit.
What you get in exchange is the catalog Relay’s users complained most about lacking — integration breadth was the single most common Relay criticism, with reviewers noting that Zapier’s ecosystem made Relay’s catalog “feel thin.” If you left Relay because your niche SaaS wasn’t supported, this is the tool that has it.
Where free stops: the Professional plan is $19.99/month and is where multi-step Zaps, premium apps, paths and filters actually live. Treat Zapier’s free tier as a demo, not a destination. See Zapier alternatives and cheaper Zapier alternatives.
Pricing: Free (100 tasks/mo, 2-step Zaps); Professional from $19.99/month
6. Pipedream — free is generous for developers, opaque for everyone else
Pipedream’s docs put the free plan at 25 credits per day, where one credit is 30 seconds of compute at 256MB of memory. Building and testing workflows costs nothing — a pointed contrast with the most common Relay complaint, that you could “blow through your balance in a pinch while creating and testing your automations.” Free accounts also get 7 days of event history and a 300-second execution timeout.
The daily credit cap doesn’t roll over and resets at midnight UTC, and Pipedream’s own pricing page doesn’t publish the free tier’s numbers plainly — community answers have quoted 25/day, 100/day and 300/month across different eras, so check the current figure yourself before you commit. Pipedream is also code-first: it’s excellent if you write Node or Python, and disorienting if Relay’s visual builder was the reason you chose Relay.
Best for: developers who want a lot of compute for nothing and don’t need a canvas. More in Pipedream alternatives.
Pricing: Free (25 credits/day per docs); Basic from $29/month billed annually
7. Gumloop — the most AI credits on a free plan
Gumloop’s free plan is 5,000 credits/month, unlimited flows, 1 seat, 1 active trigger, 2 concurrent runs. If what you’ll miss from Relay is the 500 bundled AI credits, this is the largest free AI budget in this list by an order of magnitude, and unlimited flows beats Relay’s 5.
The pinch is 1 active trigger — you can build as much as you want but only one thing can fire automatically, which is tighter than Relay’s 2 active workflows. Worth knowing: Gumloop publishes a Relay.app alternatives page that doesn’t mention the shutdown at all, so don’t read it as shutdown guidance.
Where free stops: Pro starts at $37/month for 20k+ credits.
Best for: AI-heavy workflows where one trigger is enough. See Gumloop alternatives.
Pricing: Free (5k credits/mo); Pro from $37/month
Free tiers compared
| Tool | Free monthly budget | Active workflows free | All apps free? | AI included free? | Where free ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relay.app Free | 200 steps | 2 of 5 | Yes, all 200+ | Yes, 500 credits | Deleted Aug 15, 2026 |
| Carly | Unlimited non-AI steps | Unlimited | Yes, 200+ native | No | AI agents from $35/mo |
| Activepieces | Unlimited runs | 10 flows | Smaller catalog | Yes, AI agents | $5/active flow after 10 |
| Make | 1,000 credits | 2 scenarios | Yes, 3,000+ | Pay per AI op | Core $12/mo |
| n8n (self-hosted) | Unlimited | Unlimited | Yes, all | BYO API key | You run the server |
| Zapier | 100 tasks | Unlimited, 2-step only | No — premium gated | Copilot, Agents | Professional $19.99/mo |
| Pipedream | 25 credits/day | Limited on free | Yes, all | BYO API key | Basic $29/mo |
| Gumloop | 5,000 credits | 1 active trigger | Smaller catalog | Yes, 5k credits | Pro $37/mo |
The honest summary of that table: if “free” is non-negotiable and you need real volume, Activepieces and self-hosted n8n are the only two that clear Relay’s bar without a credit card. If you need approvals specifically, none of them hand it to you natively — that’s the gap Relay’s departure actually leaves.
FAQ
When exactly do free Relay.app accounts get deleted? Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT. Accounts and all data are permanently deleted, including stored credentials and tokens for connected apps. Paying customers have until September 14, 2026.
Can I upgrade to a paid Relay plan to get the extra month? No. Relay has already switched off new signups and free-to-paid upgrades, so the September 14 date isn’t reachable from a free account. August 15 is your date.
What should I export before August 15? All of it, and prioritize your Tables — they export as CSVs, which is the only genuinely portable format in the set. Workflows, Sequences and MCP servers export as JSON and AI prompts, which no other tool can import; they’re useful as a written spec to hand to a builder or rebuild from, not as a migration file. Export run history too if you need the audit trail.
Which free alternative replaces Relay’s approval steps? Two of them, and neither is the obvious pick. Activepieces is the closest fit on a free plan: its Approval piece generates approve and disapprove links that work for people without an account, which is the one thing Relay itself never fixed. Self-hosted n8n has the most complete implementation in the category — Send and Wait for Approval on Gmail, Slack, Outlook, Teams and more — and it’s free if you run the server yourself. The ones you’d reach for first won’t help: Zapier’s Human in the Loop is a premium app on Professional and above, and Make’s is Enterprise-only and in closed beta. Neither is reachable from a free plan.
Is Carly free? Partly, and the boundary is specific: non-AI workflow steps are free and unlimited, with no subscription. The AI assistant has no free tier — agents start at $35/month. If your Relay workflows were mostly triggers, tool calls and branching, the free part covers them. If they depended on AI steps, it’s a paid move.
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