Relay.app Has Shut Down: What to Do Next

The Relay.app shutdown is complete. Free accounts and their data were deleted after August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT, and paid accounts followed on September 14 at 23:59 PT. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades had been off since July 16. If you ran outbound or ops automation on Relay, the question now is how to rebuild the processes that were living there and pick a Relay.app alternative worth carrying forward.

The announcement did not say why, but the team offered prorated refunds for annual customers, bonus steps and AI credits during the wind-down, and transition support. That still leaves a practical problem: workflows your business depended on need a new home. This post covers how to choose one, and how to reconstruct a workflow when the shutdown caught you without an export.

Why Did Relay.app Shut 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.

Two months later, there is still no farewell post. The honest answer to “why did Relay.app shut down” is that the company did not say, and we will update this post if that changes. The question you can resolve is where your workflows go next.

Relay.app Has Shut Down. What That Means Now

The wind-down is over. Free users had 30 days from July 16 before their accounts closed on August 15. Paying customers had 60 days, with full access at no charge through September 14, an automatic prorated refund on unused annual time, and extra steps and AI credits during the transition. Relay said that paid accounts, their data, and stored app credentials would be deleted when that window ended.

If you saved your exports, you have the raw material for a much easier rebuild. If you did not, the workflow logic can still be reconstructed from the systems it touched. Look at the records it created in your CRM, sent messages, Slack notifications, and spreadsheets. Those are often enough to write down the trigger, the steps, the decisions, and the result you need to recreate.

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

Relay made its exits unusually practical. During the wind-down, users could export workflows, sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, plus run history and tables as CSV files. If you have those files, start with the AI-prompt export. It describes the workflow in plain language, which is more useful to a new builder than raw JSON from a platform with its own workflow structure. Relay made the same recommendation in its documentation.

A full workspace export could take up to 24 hours to generate, and its emailed download link lasted 48 hours. Workflow screenshots were separate from the workspace zip, while run-history CSV exports capped at 100,000 rows. Those limits only matter now if you saved the files, but they explain why an export folder may not contain every visual or every historical run.

You lose the plumbing though. When Relay deleted an account, its stored credentials and tokens for connected apps were deleted too, and Relay stopped 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.

The Relay export guide explains what each historical export file contains and how to use it in a rebuild. If you have an AI-prompt export, the rebuild does not have to be yours to do. Paste it into the box below and we will rebuild it on Rills and send you a link to the finished workflow.

If You Were on Relay’s Free Plan and Missed August 15

Then your account is gone and so is everything in it. Relay’s wording was that unexported customer content “will be permanently deleted at the end of the wind-down window,” and they’ve said nothing about restoring a closed account, so treat the files as unrecoverable. The usual escape hatch doesn’t exist either: paying to buy yourself into the longer window was never available, because free-to-paid upgrades were switched off on July 16, the same day the announcement went out. Anyone who found the email in a spam folder on August 16 had no move to make.

What you have left is more than nothing, though. A workflow is a description of a process, and the process still lives in places Relay didn’t control. The workflow’s own output is sitting in your Slack channels, your CRM records, your sent mail, and your spreadsheets, and reading a few weeks of that tells you what the thing did, on what trigger, with what content. Any screenshots you took while building are worth digging for. So is your own memory, which is better than you’d expect for a flow you looked at every week.

That’s enough to rebuild from. The free rebuild offer above takes a plain-language description of the workflow, not a file, so you can describe what it did in a paragraph and get back a working version without ever having had an export. It’s a worse starting point than a proper export, and we’d rather you had one, but it’s a long way from starting over.

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, the three destinations you’ll hear about most each handle it differently, and none of them the way Relay did. Zapier’s Human in the Loop comes closest, since the reviewer can edit the drafted work before approving, but it’s a premium app starting on the Pro plan, every reviewer needs a Zapier account to respond, and each decision counts as a task. n8n gives you the machinery free on every plan, including self-hosted, but there’s no approvals inbox and the record of who approved what expires with the execution log. Make’s native approval app runs on Enterprise only, so everyone else splits the scenario in two, stashes the pending action somewhere, and emails themselves approve and reject links.

The through line is that you’d be leaving a tool that treated human review as a first-class step for tools that treat it as a plan tier or a hack you assemble yourself. The agent-first options land in a similar place for a different reason. Lindy will hand you a draft to approve, but the approving never gets any lighter, so the volume you review in month six is the volume you reviewed in week one. We ranked the main Relay.app alternatives by how well each one keeps that approval step, and compared five human-in-the-loop tools on where the approval actually lives, if you want the wider field before you commit.

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.

What Stops Rills From Shutting Down Too?

You’d be careless not to ask that a second time this year, so here’s the part you can check. Rills has taken no outside investment. No seed round, no board seat, no fund with an opinion about what this needs to be worth by 2029.

That changes which failure modes are on the table. Venture money buys speed, and the company owes an outcome large enough to return a fund in exchange. Under that math a product can be growing steadily, serving happy customers, and paying its own bills, and still be the wrong thing for the cap table to keep funding. We don’t know that this is what happened at Relay, and as noted above nobody outside the company does. The pressure just doesn’t apply to a company that never took the money. Rills runs lean and carries a small cost base, so the number it has to clear is customers covering the bill. Nobody outside can decide the product should be wound down because the curve isn’t steep enough.

Bootstrapped doesn’t mean permanent, though, and a vendor who tells you it does is selling a lie. A company without investors can run out of customers the same way a funded one runs out of runway. What it buys you is a slower, more predictable failure mode and no incentive to reprice you into an enterprise contract to make a quarterly number look right. Approvals and logic steps are free because that’s the product working as intended, not because a growth plan needs a loss leader for a while.

So judge us the way you should have been able to judge any vendor before this month: by the exits. Your workflows export as JSON and your table data as CSV whenever you want them, no support ticket and no wind-down announcement required. Data return and deletion terms are contractual in the Data Processing Agreement that applies to every account, not a policy page we can quietly revise. And if Rills ever did wind down, the floor is what Relay’s customers got: advance notice with full export access, never a surprise deletion. Migrating twice in one year is the thing you’re trying not to do again, so it’s fair to ask what the exit looks like before you carry your workflows in.

How to Rebuild a Relay Workflow After the Shutdown

Start with whatever record you have. An AI-prompt export gives a builder the clearest description. A JSON export, workflow screenshot, run-history CSV, CRM records, Slack messages, and sent email can each fill in part of the picture. Write down the trigger, the data it used, each external system it touched, and what it was meant to decide or send. That is enough to turn a lost workflow into a rebuild brief.

Then rebuild the logic in Rills using that brief or AI-prompt export as the source. Reconnect integrations as you go, because credentials do not transfer between platforms. Put approval gates at consequential sends and writes, import CSV tables where a workflow needs them, and run a small batch before pointing real volume at it. For AI outbound, the approval workflow guide shows where review is worth keeping and where confidence can reduce the queue.

Or skip that middle part entirely. Send us the AI-prompt exports and we do the rebuilding: a person here reads each one, builds the workflow on Rills, places the approval gates, and sends back a private link to the finished workflow with a short video explaining the choices we made. It costs nothing, needs no account, and the link works before you’ve signed up for anything, so you’re looking at your own automation running rather than at a marketing page. Send one workflow or send all of them. We’d rather spend the hours helping than watch another team lose theirs to a deletion.

A large workflow library takes time to reconstruct, especially when its old credentials and history are gone. There’s a step-by-step guide to switching from Relay.app if you want the rebuild checklist in one place.

Pick a Replacement You Can Live With

Relay’s closure makes replacement criteria less abstract. You need a platform where you can rebuild the workflow, reconnect the systems it depends on, and keep control over consequential actions. Cost is part of that decision too. Per-task pricing can make approval-heavy automation expensive, which is worth checking before you recreate every pause and branch from an old workflow.

If human approval is why you chose Relay, Rills carries that idea forward with a mobile review queue, a decision record on every action, and confidence scoring that can reduce review for familiar, low-risk runs. Approvals and logic steps are always free. Send us an export prompt or a written workflow description and we can rebuild it for you, then you can try a live demo and swipe through a pending approval yourself.

Common questions

When did Relay.app shut down?

Relay.app completed its shutdown on September 14, 2026 at 23:59 PT. Free accounts were deleted after August 15, and paid accounts followed after the September deadline. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades had been turned off since July 16.

What happened to Relay.app?

Relay.app told customers on July 16, 2026 that it was winding down, without providing a reason. Free accounts closed on August 15 and paid accounts closed on September 14, after which accounts and their data were permanently deleted. New signups were turned off immediately, and annual customers were offered automatic prorated refunds.

I was on Relay's free plan and didn't export my data. Is it gone?

Yes. Free accounts and everything in them were permanently deleted after August 15, 2026 at 23:59 PT. Relay has not said that it can restore a closed account. Paying to extend was never an option either, because free-to-paid upgrades were turned off on July 16. You can still rebuild a workflow from a written description of what it did, which is what the free rebuild offer runs on.

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

No. Relay's September 14, 2026 shutdown deadline has passed. During the wind-down, Relay let paid users export workflows, sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and AI prompts, along with run history and table data. If you downloaded those files, they are still useful for rebuilding elsewhere.

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

Relay said it would permanently delete unexported workspace data at the end of the wind-down period. Its export documentation also says that stored credentials and tokens for connected apps would be deleted automatically. You will need to reconnect integrations when rebuilding elsewhere.

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.

Can someone rebuild my Relay workflows for me?

Yes, and it costs nothing. Send Rills the AI-prompt export for a workflow and a person rebuilds it on Rills for you, using our agent, Ford. Once complete and verified, we'll send back a private link to the finished workflow plus a video walkthrough, usually within two business days. You can watch your own workflow run before creating an account.

Is Rills venture funded?

No. Rills has taken no outside investment, so there is no fund, board, or growth target deciding the product's future. The bar it has to clear is customers covering the bill, not a trajectory steep enough to justify a round. That makes it a slower company on purpose, and it removes the failure mode where a working product gets wound down for not scaling fast enough.

Relay had venture funding and still shut down. What if the next tool disappears too?

Judge a replacement by its exits, not its promises. Rills took no venture money, so no investor clock is running, but no vendor can promise permanence and you shouldn't accept one that tries. On Rills you can export your workflows as JSON and your table data as CSV at any time, and data return and deletion terms are contractual in the Data Processing Agreement on every account. If Rills ever wound down, you'd get what Relay's customers got at minimum: an advance-notice window with full export access, never a surprise deletion.