Relay.app Is Shutting Down: Aug 15 for Free, Sep 14 for Paid
Relay.app is shutting down. Per a notice on its homepage, free accounts and all their data are permanently deleted on August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT, and paying customers’ accounts and data follow on September 14, 2026 at 23:59 PT. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already turned off. Existing workflows keep running until the account is deleted.
No reason for the shutdown was given. Not on the homepage, not in the FAQ, not anywhere else we could find. If your workflows run something that matters, the deadline that applies to you is the only date worth acting on — anything you haven’t exported by then is gone, including the stored credentials and tokens for every app you connected.
What happened to Relay.app
The notice opens plainly:
“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.”
And later:
“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.”
“We’re grateful for all of the trust you’ve given us over the years.”
It is signed ”— The Relay.app team,” not by founder Jacob Bank personally.
What the notice does not contain is worth stating as clearly as what it does. There is no stated reason for the decision. There is no acquisition or acqui-hire announced, and no destination company named — unlike Clockwise’s shutdown in March, where Salesforce hiring the team was the headline. There is no successor product. And Relay recommended no alternative tools — they named nobody. As of this writing there’s no tech-press coverage, no Hacker News thread, and no Reddit thread. The homepage notice is the whole public record.
We’re not going to speculate past that. Anyone telling you why Relay.app shut down is guessing.
The company behind it
Relay.app was founded in 2021 in San Francisco by Jacob Bank, who came to it with an unusually on-the-nose résumé for the problem. Bank was a Director of Product Management at Google, where he led product for Gmail, Google Calendar and other Workspace products. Before that he was co-founder and CEO of Timeful, the smart calendar app acquired by Google in 2015.
The company raised $8.1 million across two rounds: a $5 million seed led by Khosla Ventures, and a $3.1 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz in October 2023, which is when the AI-powered product launched publicly with Zapier in its crosshairs. BoxGroup, Neo, and Entropia Capital round out the investor list. Early customers named at that round included Ramp, Skyflow, Warp, Motion, Lumos, and Tavus.
One caution if you go researching this yourself: three different companies use the name Relay. Relay Technologies (relaytech.co) is a London parcel-delivery firm, and it is the one that raised the $35M Series A led by Plural in February 2025. A separate Relay in Toronto does business banking. Aggregator profiles citing “$35M” or “$48.8M” for relay.app have merged the logistics company’s funding with Jacob Bank’s startup. Relay.app raised $8.1M.
The two deadlines, and what happens at each
| Free users | Paying customers | |
|---|---|---|
| Account + all data permanently deleted | Aug 15, 2026, 23:59 PT | Sep 14, 2026, 23:59 PT |
| Access until then | Yes, full | Yes, full and free |
| New signups / upgrades | Already off | Already off |
| Existing workflows | Keep running until deletion | Keep running until deletion |
For paying customers, Relay cancelled subscriptions immediately: you’ll have received a cancellation email from help@paddle.com, and there are no further charges. Annual customers get prorated refunds for unused time, automatically, within 5 business days. Access stays fully open and free for the 60-day window, and Relay is granting a bonus 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during it, at no charge — enough headroom to keep production workflows alive while you rebuild.
At deletion, Relay’s stored credentials and tokens for your connected apps are deleted along with the account. That part is a courtesy, not a loss, but it’s worth knowing the OAuth grants on your side won’t clean themselves up.
Support continues through the wind-down at support@relay.app, with priority for paying customers. The notice specifically asks teams running business-critical workloads to “reach out as early as possible” — if that’s you, take them up on it now rather than in September.
What you can export — and what the export is actually worth
Relay’s notice lists exactly three things you can take with you:
- Workflows, Sequences and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, “so you can rebuild them elsewhere”
- Run history
- Tables as CSVs
Read that first bullet closely, because the phrasing is doing honest work: rebuild them elsewhere. The JSON export is a rebuild aid, not a portable artifact. No other automation platform ingests Relay’s workflow JSON. There is no importer, and there won’t be one. What you’re exporting is a precise, machine-readable description of what your workflow did — which is genuinely useful as a reference document, and as something you can paste into an AI builder to reconstruct the logic — but it is not a migration file. Nobody clicks “import” and gets their 40 workflows back.
The run history and CSV table exports are the more straightforwardly valuable ones: those are your actual data, and they come out clean.
There’s a quiet irony in the timing. The single most persistent complaint about Relay in user reviews was that it had no workflow export or import at all — you couldn’t even move a workflow between your own accounts. It shipped with the shutdown notice.
What Relay.app was good at
This deserves saying, because a tool going away isn’t the same as a tool being bad, and Relay was well-liked. It held a 4.9 out of 5 across 71 reviews on G2 — worth noting that Relay ran an explicit review-solicitation program, so the score is real but cultivated rather than purely organic.
The praise was consistent about a few things:
- It was genuinely easy. The most repeated compliment was some version of “by far the easiest to learn and use” — non-technical ops, support, and finance people built working workflows in hours. The visual builder was clean, and path merging (branching and re-joining inside one workflow) worked without contortions.
- Support was excellent. “Fast, responsive, genuinely helpful” came up constantly.
- Human-in-the-loop was the real differentiator, and it was free on every plan. Relay let you drop a checkpoint anywhere in a workflow “whenever human judgment is needed” — four step types: Approvals, Get data input (a form sent to an assignee), task completions, and Path selection, all actionable from Slack, web, desktop, or mobile. Reviewers on Software Advice called it a unique capability distinguishing Relay from competitors. The category has since caught up — Zapier and n8n both have real approval steps now — but Relay got there early and, unlike most of them, never charged extra for it.
- No premium-connector gating. All 200+ app connectors and 300+ app-based triggers were available on every plan, including Free. In a category where the standard move is to paywall the connectors people actually need, Relay didn’t. Credit where it’s due.
It also bundled AI credits across GPT, Claude, and Gemini so you didn’t need separate provider accounts, let you build custom MCP servers in a visual builder and consume them from Claude or Cursor, and shipped Sequences (reusable sub-workflows that stay in sync across a team) and Tables (built-in datastores with triggers). It was SOC 2 and GDPR compliant.
The honest weaknesses were narrower than the strengths: integration breadth was the number-one complaint by a wide margin (Zapier’s ecosystem is an order of magnitude larger, and teams on niche SaaS “hit walls fast”), AI credit accounting was opaque enough that people reported burning their balance while testing automations, and approvers had to be Relay users — you could never route an approval to an external client. That last one was a real limitation for agencies, and it was never solved.
Where Relay users might look
Relay named no successor, and we’re not going to pretend the market has a clean one. The generic advice circulating — “Make, n8n, or Zapier” — is the answer for people who used Relay as a plain workflow engine, and it’s close to worthless for people who chose it for approvals, because none of those three do human-in-the-loop natively. You’d be rebuilding the thing you came for as a workaround.
The more useful framing, which Rills makes well in the one substantive shutdown-aware post out there, is to stop asking “what replaces Relay” and ask “what replaces approvals.” The caveat is that Rills is a narrow approval-layer product, not a general automation platform — it answers where your approvals go, not where your 40 workflows go. Most other “Relay.app alternatives” posts, including Gumloop’s, haven’t been updated for the shutdown at all, and several now quote pricing that’s simply wrong. Check dates before you trust one. We’ve mapped the options in Relay.app alternatives; our best AI workflow automation tools and no-code AI automation roundups cover the general-purpose field, and n8n alternatives is the closest map if you’re headed self-hosted.
One note on our own product, and then we’ll leave it: Carly is an AI assistant you reach over email or text that builds and runs workflows across 200+ integrations — and it’s a different shape from Relay, not a drop-in. It has no equivalent to Relay’s Approvals, Get-data-input, or Path-selection steps, and it doesn’t host or build MCP servers. What it does have is an agent that drafts and asks before sending, a Wait node that pauses until a time or a reply, and — relevant to the credits complaint — every node type except LLM runs free and unlimited, so testing a workflow doesn’t burn a balance. Pricing is free, unlimited Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. If approval gates were why you used Relay, be skeptical of anyone, us included, who tells you they’re a straight swap.
FAQ
Is Relay.app shutting down? Yes. Relay.app announced it is shutting down: free accounts and all associated data are permanently deleted on August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT, and paying customers’ accounts and data on September 14, 2026 at 23:59 PT. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already disabled.
Why is Relay.app shutting down? No reason has been given. Relay’s shutdown notice doesn’t explain the decision, and no acquisition or acqui-hire has been reported or announced. Anyone stating a cause is speculating.
Will Relay.app customers get refunds? Yes, for annual plans. Subscriptions were cancelled immediately via Paddle with no further charges, and annual customers receive automatic prorated refunds for unused time within 5 business days. Paying customers also keep full access free until September 14, plus a bonus 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during the wind-down.
Can I move my Relay.app workflows to another tool? Not directly. You can export workflows, Sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, run history, and tables as CSVs — but no other platform imports Relay’s JSON. It’s documentation to rebuild from, not a migration file. Export it anyway before your deletion date; the CSV and run-history exports are clean, usable data.
What happens to my connected app credentials? Relay’s stored credentials and tokens for connected apps are deleted along with your account at your deletion deadline.
More: Relay.app alternatives · Clockwise shut down · Best AI workflow automation tools · Best no-code AI automation tools · n8n alternatives · Gumloop alternatives · Workato alternatives · Tray.ai alternatives
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