Relay.app Alternatives: Where to Go Before the Shutdown
Relay.app is shutting down. Free accounts are deleted on August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT; paying customers get until September 14, 2026 at 23:59 PT. After that, anything you haven’t exported is gone permanently — workflows, run history, Tables, and the stored credentials and tokens for every app you connected. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already off.
That gives most people between four and eight weeks to move an automation stack. This guide is the map: what actually broke, which Relay features you’ll struggle to find elsewhere, and where each piece of your setup should land.
What happened to Relay.app
Relay.app was a visual no-code automation platform in the Zapier/Make/n8n category, built by Jacob Bank — previously Director of Product Management at Google, where he led product for Gmail and Google Calendar, and before that co-founder and CEO of Timeful, the smart calendar Google acquired in 2015. Relay was founded in 2021, raised $8.1M across two rounds from Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, BoxGroup, Neo, and Entropia Capital, and counted Ramp, Skyflow, Warp, Motion, Lumos, and Tavus among its early customers.
It was well-liked. Relay holds a 4.9/5 rating across 71 reviews on G2 — worth noting the company ran an explicit review-solicitation program, so the score is real but cultivated — and reviewers consistently praised the same things: it was the easiest builder in the category to learn, support was fast and genuinely helpful, and every integration and every human-approval feature was free on every plan, with no premium-connector gating. That last stance was unusually generous for this market.
From the notice on relay.app:
“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.”
“We’ve worked closely with many of you for years, and we know this change will be disruptive. We are very sorry for the work this will cause you, and we don’t take it lightly, so our top priority is to make this transition as seamless as possible.”
No reason for the shutdown was given — not on the homepage, not in the FAQ, not anywhere else. There’s no announced acquisition, no named destination company, and no successor product. We’re not going to speculate, and you should be skeptical of any page that does. Relay also recommends no alternatives; they named nobody.
The wind-down terms are unusually decent. Subscriptions were cancelled immediately via Paddle, annual customers get prorated refunds within 5 business days, everyone keeps full access free for 60 days, and paying customers get a bonus 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during the window at no charge. Existing workflows keep running until the deadline. Support continues at support@relay.app, and the notice explicitly asks business-critical teams to reach out as early as possible. We covered the announcement itself in Relay.app is shutting down — this post is about where to go.
One thing to understand about the export before you rely on it. Relay lets you export workflows, Sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, plus run history, plus Tables as CSVs. Read that carefully: it’s a rebuild aid, not a portable artifact. No other platform ingests Relay’s JSON. The AI-prompt export exists precisely because the realistic path is handing a description of your workflow to a builder somewhere else and reconstructing it. Budget rebuild time, not import time. (There’s a small irony here: the longest-standing complaint about Relay on G2 was that it had no workflow export or import at all. It shipped at shutdown.)
What Relay.app users lost
Relay’s pitch was “workflow automation beyond triggers and actions,” and it meant it. Several things it did have no clean equivalent anywhere else, and which ones you relied on determines where you should go.
- Human-in-the-loop checkpoints — the real differentiator. Relay had four distinct HITL step types: Approvals, Get data input (send a form to an assignee and use their answer downstream), task completions, and Path selection (a human picks which branch the workflow takes). All actionable from Slack, web, desktop, and mobile — and all free on every plan, including Free. Software Advice reviewers called it a unique capability distinguishing Relay from competitors, and they were right. This is the hardest thing on the list to replace.
- Sequences. Reusable sub-workflows shared across a team: build a block once, call it from twenty workflows, update it in one place and everything stays in sync.
- Bundled AI credits across GPT, Claude, and Gemini. No separate OpenAI or Anthropic accounts, no juggling provider keys. BYO-key was supported if you wanted it, but you didn’t need it.
- Custom MCP servers. You could build an MCP server in Relay’s visual builder and consume it from Claude or Cursor. Agent steps could also connect out to remote MCP servers — though only Agents on Anthropic Claude models could do that.
- Agents and Tables. Agents were AI teammates that owned a set of workflows (“Customer Support Agent,” “Personal Assistant”). Tables were built-in datastores with table triggers, so your data and your automation lived in one place.
- Paths with merging. Conditional branching that could actually merge back together inside a single workflow — a specific thing Relay reviewers called out that clunkier builders handle badly.
Be honest with yourself about which of these were load-bearing. If Approvals and Path selection were the reason you chose Relay, most of the obvious replacements will disappoint you and you should read the approval-specific options below carefully. If you mainly needed reliable triggers, a wide connector catalog, and a few AI steps, you have good options and a straightforward migration. And if the thing that stung was step metering — Relay charged a step for every action, with 200/month on Free and only 1,500/month on the $59 Team plan, which is why reviewers complained about blowing through their balance while building and testing — that’s a solvable problem with the right pricing model.
Where to move your Relay.app workflows
1. Carly — replaces metered step-by-step automation, and the drafts-before-sending pattern
Carly is an AI assistant you reach over email or text, with a workflow engine underneath. The relevant part for Relay refugees is the pricing model: every node type except LLM runs free and unlimited. You only pay when a step calls a model. If the thing that squeezed you at Relay was watching credits evaporate while you tested a workflow — the second-most-cited complaint in Relay’s reviews — that specific pain doesn’t exist here. Testing is free. Running 50,000 non-AI steps a month is free.
The other structural difference: you don’t drag anything. You email Carly what you want, and she builds the workflow, tests it, debugs it, and keeps it running. There’s a visual canvas — you just don’t wire it by hand. Relay’s own reviewers flagged a steep learning curve for anyone new to conditional logic, and this sidesteps it entirely.
What it replaces from Relay.app: The workflow engine itself — ten node types including trigger, tool, llm, http, branch (if/else and switch), filter, foreach, wait, sub, and action, across 200+ native integrations plus bring-your-own-API-key for anything else with a public API. Carly’s sub node is a direct answer to Sequences: a sub-workflow callable as a step, or exposed as a tool the agent itself can call. The Wait node pauses until a time, a reply, or an explicit resume. And Carly drafts before sending — email lands in Drafts, never auto-sent, and you can tell her “ask me before sending X.”
Where it honestly doesn’t replace Relay: Carly has no first-class approval gate. There’s no Approvals step, no “Approved?” branch, no approve/reject button that a workflow blocks on. If your Relay workflows leaned on Approvals, Get-data-input forms, or Path selection as structural primitives, Carly’s answer is a different shape — an agent that drafts and asks you before acting, plus a Wait node that can pause for a reply — and that may not be what you want. Be skeptical and test it against a real workflow before you commit. Carly also does not build or host MCP servers; if you built custom MCP servers in Relay, nothing here inherits that.
Best for: Relay users who were metered into a corner, want an assistant to do the building, and whose “approvals” were really “don’t send this without showing me first.”
Pricing: Free, unlimited Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month
2. Zapier — replaces the connector catalog, and has a real approval step
Zapier is the answer to Relay’s single most-cited weakness. Integration breadth was the #1 complaint in Relay reviews — teams with niche SaaS “hit walls fast” against Relay’s 200+ connectors, and Zapier’s catalog is roughly 8,000 apps. If you left an app on the table because Relay didn’t reach it, that constraint is gone.
What it replaces from Relay.app: Triggers, actions, multi-step logic, paths, Tables, and the connector catalog several times over. It also has a real human-in-the-loop primitive: Human in the Loop’s Request Approval action pauses a Zap until a reviewer approves, declines, or edits the data, with notifications to email or Slack and a configurable “action if reviewer declines.” Two caveats worth knowing up front: it’s a premium app available on Professional, Team, and Enterprise but not Free, and reviewers must have a Zapier account — the same limitation that frustrated Relay users routing approvals to outside clients, which Relay never solved. Zapier didn’t solve it either.
Best for: Teams whose migration is blocked on integration coverage.
Pricing: Free plan with 100 tasks/month and two-step workflows; Professional from $19.99/month ($239.88/year); Team from $69/month. Note it’s task-metered, same as Relay was.
3. Make — replaces the visual canvas and path merging
Make is the closest thing to Relay’s feel: a visual canvas with real branching, routers, and merges, aimed at people who like seeing the shape of their automation. If path merging was a feature you specifically valued in Relay, Make handles it natively rather than as a workaround.
What it replaces from Relay.app: The visual builder, conditional paths with merging, error handling, and iterators. Make does have a Human in the Loop app, but it’s Enterprise-only and in closed beta, so for anyone coming off a $19 or $59 Relay plan it may as well not exist — you’d build approvals as a webhook-and-wait pattern instead, which works but is a construction project, not a checkbox.
Best for: Visual builders who want more power than Relay had and don’t mind more complexity.
Pricing: Free plan with 1,000 credits/month and 2 active scenarios; Core $12/month; Pro $21/month; Teams $38/month (annual saves 15%+). All credit-metered.
4. n8n — replaces everything, if you’ll host it
n8n is the escape hatch from metering entirely. Self-host the fair-code Community Edition and there are no step limits, no credit balance, and no vendor who can shut down and delete your data — which, this month, is not an abstract concern. It’s also the most capable tool on this list: custom code, real branching, AI agent nodes, and MCP support.
What it replaces from Relay.app: Essentially the whole engine, plus custom JavaScript, webhooks, and HTTP — all things Relay had. It also gets closest to Relay’s Approvals step: the Slack node’s “Send and Wait for Response” and the Gmail node’s “Send and Wait for Approval” pause the workflow until the recipient clicks approve or disapprove. The Gmail version is the one detail worth migrating for: the approval goes to an email address, so the approver doesn’t need an n8n account — which is exactly the thing Relay never fixed and Zapier still requires. Separately, the Wait node’s “On Form Submitted” resume covers Relay’s Get data input pattern. The tradeoff is honest: n8n expects far more of you than Relay ever did, and Relay’s whole reputation was being learnable by non-technical business users.
Best for: Teams with someone technical, anyone routing approvals to external clients, and anyone who never wants to read a shutdown notice again.
Pricing: Community Edition is free and self-hosted; Cloud Starter €20/month billed annually (2,500 executions); Pro €50/month (10,000 executions); Business €667/month.
5. Gumloop — replaces AI-heavy workflows
Gumloop is the closest match for Relay users whose workflows were mostly AI steps rather than app plumbing — scraping, extraction, summarization, content generation at volume. Its own Relay alternatives page predates the shutdown and doesn’t mention it, so treat that page’s framing as marketing rather than migration advice, but the product is a legitimate fit for this shape of work.
What it replaces from Relay.app: AI steps and the bundled-credits model, plus Agents. No human-approval primitive comparable to Relay’s four HITL step types.
Best for: AI-first workflows where the model is the work. Compare with the field in Gumloop alternatives.
Pricing: Free plan with 5k credits/month, 1 seat, 1 active trigger; Pro $37/month with 20k+ credits and unlimited seats; Enterprise custom.
6. Lindy — replaces the Agents concept
Lindy is built around the same idea Relay shipped as Agents: an AI teammate that owns a set of responsibilities and runs them on triggers. If you’d built a “Customer Support Agent” or “Personal Assistant” in Relay and that was your primary use, Lindy is the most direct conceptual descendant.
What it replaces from Relay.app: Agents, AI steps, triggers, and a decent connector catalog. Worth knowing: Lindy’s own published figures for Relay’s pricing are wrong — they’re working from an older price card — which is a reasonable proxy for how carefully any evergreen comparison page has been maintained.
Best for: Teams who thought in agents rather than in workflows.
Pricing: No free tier; 7-day free trial on individual plans. Plus $49.99/month; Pro $99.99/month (3× usage); Max $199.99/month (7× usage); Enterprise custom.
7. Activepieces — replaces Relay’s open, no-gating spirit
Activepieces is the option that most resembles what Relay users liked philosophically: an MIT-licensed open-source builder with no premium-connector tax. Relay’s “every integration free on every plan” stance was one of its most-praised traits, and this is the closest thing to it that isn’t going away.
What it replaces from Relay.app: The builder, triggers, actions, branching, tables, AI agents, and MCP servers — and unlike everything above, its cloud pricing isn’t metered by step or task at all.
Best for: Small teams who want Relay’s openness with a pricing model that doesn’t punish testing, and who are comfortable with a smaller ecosystem than Zapier’s.
Pricing: 10 free active flows with unlimited runs, then $5 per active flow/month; Ultimate is custom/annual. Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free to self-host.
8. Rills — replaces the approvals, and only the approvals
Rills published the one other shutdown-aware page in this space, and its argument is smart: don’t ask “what replaces Relay,” ask “what replaces approvals.” It’s a dedicated approval layer — a mobile approval queue, confidence scoring that learns which actions can auto-approve over time, free approval and logic steps, and 90+ day decision records.
What it replaces from Relay.app: The Approvals step, well. What it can’t replace is the other 90% — Rills is a narrow approval layer, not a general automation platform, and it will not absorb your 40 Relay workflows. It answers “where do my approvals go,” not “where does my automation go.”
Best for: Teams whose Relay usage was overwhelmingly approval gates, or who want to pair a real approval layer with Zapier/Make/n8n doing the plumbing.
Pricing: Approvals and logic steps free; billed on consequential actions (AI calls, external sends). Check current rates directly — this is a young product.
Relay.app Alternatives Compared
| Tool | Best for | Replaces from Relay.app | Native approval step? | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carly | Escaping step metering; drafts-before-send | Workflow engine, Sequences (sub), 200+ integrations | No — drafts + Wait instead | Free workflows; agents from $35/mo |
| Zapier | Connector coverage | Catalog, paths, tables, approvals | Yes — premium, Pro+; approver needs an account | Free (100 tasks); from $19.99/mo |
| Make | Visual canvas and path merging | Builder, paths with merge, iterators | No (build it) | Free (1,000 credits); from $12/mo |
| n8n | No metering, no vendor risk | Nearly the whole engine + code | Yes — send-and-wait; email approver needs no account | Free self-hosted; Cloud from €20/mo |
| Gumloop | AI-first workflows | AI steps, bundled credits, agents | No | Free (5k credits); Pro $37/mo |
| Lindy | Teams who thought in agents | Agents, AI steps, triggers | No | No free tier; from $49.99/mo |
| Activepieces | Relay’s open, no-gating spirit | Builder, agents, MCP, tables | No | 10 free flows; $5/active flow/mo |
| Rills | Approvals specifically | Approvals only | Yes (it’s the product) | Free approvals; usage-based |
| Relay.app | — | Deleted Aug 15 / Sep 14, 2026 | — | — |
FAQ
When exactly does Relay.app shut down? Two dates. Free accounts and all their data are permanently deleted August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT. Paying customers get until September 14, 2026 at 23:59 PT. Existing workflows keep running until then, and new signups are already turned off.
Why is Relay.app shutting down? No reason has been given publicly — not on relay.app, not in the FAQ, and not anywhere else. No acquisition has been reported and no destination company has been named. Anyone telling you why is guessing.
Can I import my Relay.app workflows into another tool? No. Relay’s export gives you workflows, Sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, run history, and Tables as CSVs — but no other platform ingests Relay’s JSON format. The AI-prompt export is the practical path: feed the description of each workflow to your new tool’s builder and rebuild it. Export everything before your deadline anyway; the credentials and tokens for your connected apps are deleted along with the account.
What’s the closest replacement for Relay.app’s human-in-the-loop steps? n8n is the closest general-purpose match: the Slack and Gmail nodes’ send-and-wait operations genuinely pause a workflow until someone clicks approve, and the Gmail version sends to an email address, so the approver needs no account — the one thing Relay never fixed. Its Wait node’s form-submission resume also covers the Get-data-input pattern. Zapier’s Human in the Loop covers simpler cases with far less setup, but it’s a premium app on Professional and above, and reviewers do need a Zapier account. Rills does approvals better than any of them but doesn’t do the rest of your automation. Nothing on this list reproduces all four of Relay’s HITL step types.
Do Relay.app customers get refunds? Yes. Subscriptions were cancelled immediately, annual customers receive prorated refunds within 5 business days, and everyone keeps full access free for 60 days — plus a bonus 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during the wind-down, at no charge, which is enough headroom to run your workflows while you rebuild them elsewhere.
More: Relay.app is shutting down · Free Relay.app alternatives · Best AI workflow automation tools · Best no-code AI automation tools · n8n alternatives · Gumloop alternatives · Lindy alternatives · Zapier alternatives · Make alternatives · Best AI agent platforms · Clockwise shut down
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
