Relay.app Is Shutting Down: Why, Key Dates, Where to Move

On its homepage, Relay.app is telling customers it’s shutting down. Free accounts stop on August 15, 2026, paying customers get until September 14, and after each of those dates the accounts and all associated data are permanently deleted. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already off. If you run outbound or ops automation on Relay, you’re now on a clock, and the search for a Relay.app alternative is a migration project with a deadline attached, not a leisurely bake-off.

The announcement doesn’t say why, but the team was gracious about it with prorated refunds for annual customers, bonus steps and AI credits during the wind-down, and support through the transition. That’s a great way to close a product and we commend them for it. It still leaves you with the same problem though: workflows your business depends on need a new home in the next few weeks. This post is about picking that home well while you’re already doing the work of moving.

Why Is Relay.app Shutting Down?

Relay hasn’t said. The announcement customers received on July 16, 2026 covers the wind-down logistics carefully, with the deadlines, the refunds, and the export instructions, but gives no reason for the decision. There’s no farewell post from the team as of this writing, so anything you read about the cause is guesswork, ours included.

What is public is the shape of the company. Relay was founded in July 2021 by Jacob Bank, who sold his previous startup Timeful to Google in 2015 and went on to lead product for Gmail and Google Calendar before leaving to start Relay. The company raised $8.1 million across two rounds, a $5 million seed led by Khosla Ventures in 2022 and a $3.1 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2023, and pitched itself as a complete Zapier alternative with human-in-the-loop approvals built in. That’s a lean war chest for a head-on run at the automation incumbents, and the market has only grown more crowded since, but whether money, growth, or something else entirely drove the decision is not something anyone outside the company can confirm.

If Relay publishes a reason, we’ll update this post. For now the honest answer to “why is Relay.app shutting down” is that they haven’t told us, and the open question you probably have is where your workflows go next.

Relay.app Is Shutting Down, and the Clock Is Ticking

Free users have until August 15 at 23:59 PT to keep using the product and export data, after which free accounts and their data are deleted. Paying customers keep full access for free through September 14, receive an automatic prorated refund on any unused annual time within five business days, and get an extra 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during the 60-day window to ease the move. After September 14, paid accounts and their data go too.

Don’t take their generous offer of free access as an excuse to file it under “deal with later.” Later arrives fast when the thing you’re migrating is a set of live workflows with integrations, credentials, and run history behind them. A workflow you rebuild calmly in July is a workflow you’re not rebuilding in a panic in September. Treat the grace period as time to migrate deliberately, not as time before you have to start.

What You Can Take With You, and What You Can’t

Relay made the exits super reasonable, which helps a lot. You can export your workflows, sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and as AI prompts, per Relay’s own export documentation. Your run history and your tables can be exported as CSV files. The AI-prompt export is useful, because it hands you a plain-language description of what each workflow does, which is exactly what you can feed a new builder to recreate it.

You lose the plumbing though. When a Relay account is deleted, its stored credentials and tokens for your connected apps are deleted too, and Relay stops accessing those apps. So even a perfect JSON export doesn’t teleport a working workflow into another tool as you’ll need to reconnect every integration by hand on the other side like your Slack, your CRM, your email, and the rest. That reconnection work is unavoidable no matter where you land, which is the argument for choosing carefully. You’re forced to pay the switching cost once, so spend it moving to the platform you’d want for the next few years, not the one that most resembles the tool that’s closing.

What Relay Did Well, So You Don’t Lose It in the Move

Before you pick a replacement, be clear about why you were on Relay in the first place so you don’t drop the feature that mattered. Relay’s strengths were visual, multi-step workflows, bundled AI credits so model calls worked out of the box, and real human-in-the-loop steps. Those approval and manual-input steps are what set it apart from a fire-and-forget automation tool. You could put a person in the middle of a flow and make the automation wait for a decision.

If that approval step is the reason Relay earned a place in your stack, then a plain automation tool is a downgrade. Moving to Zapier or Make means rebuilding human approval as a workaround, splitting the workflow in two, stashing the pending action somewhere, and emailing yourself approve and reject links. You’d be leaving a tool that treated human review as a first-class step for tools that treat it as a hack you assemble yourself.

Where Rills Fits as a Relay.app Alternative

Rills is built around that pause for review. It’s an approval layer for AI that acts on your company’s behalf: an AI proposes a consequential action, a human approves or rejects it from a mobile queue, and the workflow continues. If you came to Relay for human-in-the-loop steps, this is the same idea but taken further.

The review burden gets lighter as trust builds on Rills. Relay’s approval step is a switch that’s on or off per workflow and stays the same on the hundredth approval as on the first. Rills scores its confidence on every proposed action against the review step’s inputs. Patterns you reliably approve start clearing on their own, while anything unusual keeps stopping for a person. So a sequence sending renewal nudges to known contacts and cold first-touch emails to new domains can handle both on their own terms, waving the routine renewals through while the risky cold sends still wait for a look.

Every action leaves a decision record. When a prospect complains or a manager asks why a particular email went out, you can pull up what the AI proposed, who approved it, when, and the context they saw. That record lives on every plan with a generous 90 day minimum retention.

And the pricing doesn’t punish the thing you’re buying. On Rills, approvals and logic steps are free, and you’re billed only for high-value actions like an AI call or an external send. Adding a review step, a data transformation, or a branch that catches an edge case costs nothing. Relay metered steps and AI credits, so more workflow machinery meant a bigger bill. If the reason you’re adopting an approval layer is to review the risky actions, a model that charged you per review would work against you. There’s a full Rills vs Relay.app comparison if you want the side-by-side.

The last practical difference is where the approvals live. Relay’s human steps run inside a web flow, so approving means being at a browser. Rills puts the queue on your phone, so you swipe to approve from wherever you are, which matters a lot if you’re not always at your desk.

How to Move Your Workflows Before the Window Closes

The migration itself is straightforward if you do it in order. Start by exporting everything from Relay now, while your account is active: the JSON and AI-prompt versions of each workflow, your run history, and your tables as CSV. Getting the data out has a hard deadline so do it now even if you want to do it again later.

Then rebuild the logic in Rills using the AI-prompt export as your source. Because that export already describes the workflow in plain language, you can hand it to Rills’s builder and get a working draft rather than starting from an empty canvas. Reconnect your integrations as you go, since those credentials never transfer between platforms for security purposes. As you place each step, put approval gates where the risk actually is like the external sends and consequential writes, and leave the internal logic to run untouched. Import your CSV tables where a workflow reads from them. Run each rebuilt workflow on a small batch before you point real volume at it, the same way you’d sanity-check any new automation.

None of this is a weekend if you have dozens of workflows, which is the case for spreading it across the grace period instead of saving it for the end. There’s a step-by-step guide to switching from Relay.app if you want the checklist in one place.

Do the Move Now, Not on August 14

The mistake with a wind-down is treating the final date as the deadline. The real deadline is whenever your team has the bandwidth to rebuild without cutting corners, and that window is now, not the week before deletion. Export your data today so it’s safe regardless, then rebuild at a sane pace while your Relay account still runs alongside as a reference.

If human approval is why you chose Relay, Rills is the closest thing to a pure upgrade of that idea, with the review shrinking as trust builds, a decision record on every action, and approvals that never cost you a credit. Try a live demo and swipe through a pending approval yourself. You’re going to rebuild these workflows once. Rebuild them somewhere the review gets lighter over time and the paper trail builds itself.

Common questions

When is Relay.app shutting down?

August 15, 2026 for free accounts and September 14, 2026 for paying customers, per Relay's own announcement. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already turned off. Existing workflows keep running until those dates.

What happened to Relay.app?

Relay.app told customers on July 16, 2026 that it is winding down, without providing a reason. Free accounts close on August 15, 2026 and paid accounts on September 14, 2026, after which each account and its data are permanently deleted. New signups were turned off immediately, and annual customers get automatic prorated refunds.

Can I export my workflows and data from Relay.app?

Yes. Relay lets you export workflows, sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, your run history, and your tables as CSV files. Export is available now, before your account's deletion date.

What happens to my Relay.app data if I don't export it?

It is permanently deleted at the end of the wind-down window. Relay also deletes its stored credentials and tokens for your connected apps at that point, so it loses access to those apps too. Export anything you want to keep before the cutoff.

What is a good Relay.app alternative with human approval steps?

Rills is built around the approval step Relay users came for. Consequential AI actions wait in a mobile queue, a human approves or rejects, and every decision is logged. Approvals and logic steps are free, so adding review does not raise your bill.

Do I have to rebuild my Relay workflows from scratch to switch?

You rebuild the logic, but not from a blank page. Relay's JSON and AI-prompt exports describe each workflow well enough to hand to a builder, and you reconnect your integrations along the way since credentials do not transfer between platforms.