Relay.app Is Gone — Move to Make

Relay.app is permanently gone. As of September 14, 2026, paid accounts were deleted — every workflow, run history, Table, and stored app credential wiped with them. Free accounts went first on August 15. There is no export window, no recovery path, no migration tool. If you built approval flows, lead routing, or client onboarding automations in Relay, you are rebuilding from scratch today.

What Happened

Relay.app announced the shutdown on July 16, 2026. Founder Jacob Bank is rejoining Google as VP of Product for Chrome, where he’ll lead product and developer relations. No acquisition. No acqui-hire with a named destination. No successor product. Relay simply closed.

The timeline: free accounts lost access and were deleted after August 15 at 23

PT. Paid accounts kept full access — at no charge — through September 14 at 23 PT. Annual subscribers received prorated refunds for unused billing periods within five business days. Paid workspaces got an additional 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during the 60-day transition window, which is a decent gesture but doesn’t help anyone who needed the workflows to keep running.

What’s gone: everything. Workflows, run history, Tables, stored app credentials. Relay’s shutdown documentation is explicit — there is no recovery path. Relay’s own docs named Make as the recommended alternative and flagged that Make offers a white-glove migration experience for Relay.app customers. That’s the closest thing to an official handoff from the team that built your old tool.

Why It Matters

Relay carved out a real product argument: human-in-the-loop automation where a person could review, edit, or approve any step before it executed. That primitive — review before run — doesn’t exist natively in Make, Zapier, or n8n. Workarounds exist: email-based approval gates, form-gated paths, webhook-triggered pauses. They work. But they require setup that Relay handled out of the box in four clicks.

Bank’s return to Google to work on Chrome-Gemini integration is not a coincidence. It signals where the smart money on AI-assisted workflows is going: into the browser, not into standalone SaaS. For the rest of us rebuilding automation stacks today, the lesson is simpler: horizontal automation at venture scale is a brutal market, and Relay couldn’t survive it.

The gap Relay leaves is real. If your most important workflows relied on human approval steps — lead qualification sign-off, client onboarding review, content approval before send — factor in rebuild time before you pick a platform. The platform decision and the workflow redesign are two separate problems.

The Take

Move to Make. Relay’s own shutdown team said so, and the reasoning holds: Make’s visual scenario canvas is the closest mental model to how Relay worked. Core is $9/month on annual billing for 10,000 credits with unlimited active scenarios. Make’s credit model charges per module call, not per workflow run — for multi-step flows, that’s 3–5× cheaper than Zapier at equivalent volume.

The one gap you need to plan around: Make’s human-in-the-loop functionality is Enterprise-only and in closed beta as of September 2026. It is not self-serve. If HITL approval steps were the core of your Relay setup, you’re designing workarounds on any platform right now. Make’s workarounds (email approval links, form-gated scenario paths) are well-documented and functional — just not as clean as what Relay gave you natively.

If you’re a technical solopreneur comfortable managing a small VPS, n8n is the honest second answer. n8n Cloud Starter is $20/month (annual) for 2,500 executions with unlimited workflows and users. The critical pricing difference: n8n counts per workflow run, not per step — a 10-step branching automation costs one execution, not ten credits. The self-hosted Community Edition is free with unlimited executions, best for anyone happy running it on a $5–7/month server.

Zapier is the right call only if you need an app that exists in Zapier’s 7,000+ integration catalog and nowhere else. The per-task billing model is punishing for the kind of multi-step flows Relay users built. Professional starts at $19.99/month (annual) for 750 tasks per month. A 4-step workflow burns 4 tasks per run — a lead-routing flow processing 30 leads per day exhausts that plan in under a week. At scale, you’ll be on a $49/month or $69/month plan fast. Zapier is a fine tool. It’s just the wrong pricing model for this migration.

The decision rule is clean: Make if you want a hosted visual builder at a sane price. n8n if you want execution-based pricing and you’re comfortable with a server. Zapier only if a specific integration forces your hand — and budget accordingly.