Relay.app Alternative: Move Before Sep 14

Free Relay.app accounts stopped working three days ago. If you were on one, the workflows, run history, credentials and table data are already deleted, and Relay states plainly that nothing comes back. Paying customers have until 23:59 PT on Monday, September 14, 2026, per Relay's announcement, which leaves 27 days to export what you built and settle on a Relay.app alternative that can actually run it.

Most of the migration advice published since July treats choosing a Relay.app alternative as a shopping decision, as though the work finishes once you've picked a destination. The harder half is that Relay's export doesn't drop cleanly into any other builder, and the link that delivers it expires faster than most people expect.

Key Takeaways

• Free accounts died at 23:59 PT on August 15, 2026. Paid accounts have until 23:59 PT on September 14, 2026, after which the workspace, user account, and stored app credentials get deleted automatically.
• A full workspace export can take up to 24 hours to build, and the emailed download link stays valid for only 48 hours after it lands.
• Workflow JSON does not port. Relay says so itself: different builders use different structures, so the .json needs AI interpretation before it means anything elsewhere.
• Workflow screenshots are not in the export. They're a separate tool, and visual branching logic is the thing you'll miss most when rebuilding.
• Relay's docs site currently contradicts its own banner about which tier expires on which date. Trust the banner and the announcement page.

What Relay actually switched off, and when

Relay.app launched in 2021 as a workflow automation platform with AI steps and human approval built in. Founder Jacob Bank is heading back to Google as VP of Product for Chrome, taking part of the team with him, a move TechCrunch reported on August 17.

The wind-down started well before the deadlines. Since July 16 new signups and free-to-paid upgrades have been off, and paying customers had their subscriptions cancelled through Paddle on that same date. You aren't billed after July 16, but access continues for free until September 14; annual customers get a prorated refund for the unused remainder, which Relay says arrives within five business days. Paid workspaces also received an extra 25,000 steps and 10,000 AI credits per month for 60 days to cover the transition.

Everything you already built keeps running until your date. That's the trap, honestly, because a workflow that still fires every morning doesn't feel like an emergency, and the export queue is the only part with a clock on it.

The export has a 48-hour fuse

Go do this part before you read the rest. In the Relay dashboard, Export workspace data sends you to settings and builds a .zip of everything, and Relay's export documentation walks through the five tools on offer. Relay warns the build can take up to 24 hours for a large workspace, and when it finishes you get an email with a download link that stays live for 48 hours. Those 48 hours run from the moment the file is generated, not from when you remember to check your inbox, so kicking off the export on a Friday afternoon is a good way to find a dead link on Monday.

The archive holds a folder per Workflow, Sequence, MCP Server and Table, and each folder carries a rebuild prompt as an .md file, run history as CSV, a JSON file describing the workflow structure, a JSON file per run, and a CSV of table data where one exists.

That prompt file matters more than the JSON, and Relay is refreshingly direct about why: different workflow builders use different JSON structures, so the export "is not perfectly transferrable to other tools without AI interpretation of the structure first." Read that as a warning rather than a footnote. Nobody is importing a Relay workflow into Make and watching it light up. The .md rebuild prompt is the real artifact, and Relay's own recommendation is to hand workflow.json and prompt.md to an AI assistant and let it reconstruct the logic.

Screenshots sit outside all of this. Saving a workflow as screenshots is its own tool and, in Relay's words, "not included in workspace data export." If a workflow branches in ways the prompt won't capture, take those screenshots now; a picture of the old graph is worth a lot at 11pm on September 13.

Relay's docs contradict Relay's banner

Here's something that hasn't shown up in the migration guides. Load the Relay docs announcement page today and the orange banner across the top reads "shutting down on August 15, 2026 for free users and September 14, 2026 for paying customers." The body copy immediately below it says the opposite: "Current paying customers will continue to have access until August 15, 2026, and current free users will continue to have access until September 14, 2026."

The banner is right. The announcement on relay.app, Relay's own post on X, and TechCrunch's reporting all line up on free ending August 15 and paid ending September 14. It's a copy error on one page rather than a change of plan, but a paying customer who reads only the body text would think access ended three days ago and might not bother exporting at all. If you forwarded that page to a colleague, forward the correction too.

Picking a Relay.app alternative by what the workflow actually did

Relay points customers at Zapier, Make and n8n for repeated workflows, and suggests Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Work for one-off jobs. That list is fine as far as it goes, though sorting by brand is the wrong first move. Sort by what your workflows were doing.

Workflows that mostly shuttle fields between SaaS apps on a trigger, with light branching, port to a conventional automation builder without much thought, and our rundown of AI automation tool alternatives compares the usual destinations. The step-by-step model those tools use is the model Relay used, so the rebuild is mechanical, and this is the case where the right Relay.app alternative is whichever builder your team already knows.

Workflows built around Relay's AI steps are a different problem. If a workflow was doing multi-step reasoning, reading a document and deciding what to do next, you'd be flattening real judgment back into a rigid flowchart by forcing it into a step-by-step builder. A shutdown is an irritating time to redesign anything, but this is genuinely the moment to ask whether that job should be an agent rather than a diagram, and our breakdown of AI agents versus automation tools covers where the line falls.

One Relay feature deserves checking before you commit to anything. Relay shipped human-in-the-loop steps and AI output reviews as first-class pieces of a workflow, so a run could pause and wait for a person to approve a draft or a payment before continuing. Plenty of tools can send an approval message; far fewer can hold a consequential action in place indefinitely until someone says go, then resume the same run with that decision recorded. If any workflow of yours depended on that pause, make it the test case when you evaluate a Relay.app alternative, because discovering the gap after you've rebuilt forty workflows is expensive.

Then there's the constraint Relay's recommendation quietly skips. Handing prompt.md to an AI assistant rebuilds the logic, but a chat session isn't infrastructure: you close the tab and nothing fires at 6am on Tuesday. Relay ran your scheduled triggers on its own machines, which is precisely the part you lose on September 14, and a rebuilt workflow needs a host that's awake when you aren't. That gap is what MoClaw fills, as a hosted cloud AI computer that holds the rebuilt job and runs it on schedule, sitting alongside whichever builder you pick rather than replacing that decision.

Cost tends to decide this for smaller teams. The people asking around for a Relay.app alternative are frequently the ones who wanted workflow automation "without enterprise-level costs," and per-task pricing on a busy workflow gets unpleasant quickly. MoClaw runs on credits instead, with 1,000 a month on the $20 plan and a 3-day trial that also carries 1,000, so you can price the rebuild before committing to it.

A 27-day plan that isn't a panic

Export first, today, and don't wait for a tidy moment. Then screenshot any workflow whose branching isn't obvious from its prompt, and pull table data while the account still opens. Notice that none of this requires you to have chosen a Relay.app alternative yet; the archive is portable, and the decision keeps.

Once the archive is safe, go through the folder list and delete rather than migrate. Dragging dormant workflows nobody has touched since spring into a new platform is how migrations turn into month-long projects; a shutdown is a decent excuse for a cull, and it's free to do now.

For what survives, rebuild the highest-value workflow first and run it in parallel with Relay while both still work. You have until September 14 with a live system to compare against, which is a luxury the free-tier users never got. Keeping the rebuilt version running somewhere hosted during that overlap, on MoClaw or anywhere else that stays up, means you're comparing two live systems instead of trusting that the new one behaves.

This is a familiar shape by now. When Manus locked accounts and forced deletion, the same export-and-rebuild scramble played out, and the people who came through it cleanly were the ones who exported early and rebuilt selectively rather than wholesale. Relay handled its wind-down considerably better than most: 60 days of free access for paying customers, prorated refunds, purpose-built export tooling and a documented recommendation list is more than a shutting-down company owes anyone.

Which doesn't change the deadline. If your workflows still matter to you, the export is the only task with a hard clock, and it's the one that takes 24 hours to run.

FAQ

When exactly does Relay.app shut down?

Free accounts ended at 23:59 PT on August 15, 2026. Paying customers keep access until 23:59 PT on September 14, 2026. After that the workspace, account, and stored app credentials and tokens are deleted automatically. Relay's docs page currently states these two dates the wrong way round in its body copy; the banner and the announcement page have it right.

Can I still export my Relay.app data?

Paying customers can, until September 14. Free accounts lost access on August 15 along with the data. Start the workspace export early because it can take up to 24 hours to generate, and the emailed download link only works for 48 hours after that.

Will my Relay workflow JSON import into Zapier, Make or n8n?

No. Relay states that different builders use different JSON structures and its export needs AI interpretation before another tool can use it. The prompt.md rebuild prompt included in each folder is the more useful starting point.

What does Relay.app officially recommend as a replacement?

For repeated workflows, Zapier, Make and n8n; Relay notes that Zapier published a migration guide and Make is offering white-glove migration for Relay customers. For one-off automation it points at Claude Cowork or Code and ChatGPT Work or Codex, suggesting you feed those the workflow.json and prompt.md files.

What's the best Relay.app alternative for AI-heavy workflows?

There isn't a single answer, and be wary of any list that gives you one. If the workflow was mostly app plumbing, a conventional builder like Make or n8n rebuilds it quickly. If it was doing multi-step reasoning, rebuilding it as an agent on a hosted runtime tends to fit better than flattening it into a step diagram. The useful filter is whether your workflows needed AI steps, scheduled triggers, or human approval pauses, since those three are where alternatives differ most.

Do I get a refund?

Annual customers get an automatic prorated refund for the unused remainder of the billing period, which Relay says arrives within five business days. Subscriptions were cancelled through Paddle effective July 16, so nobody has been charged since then, and access simply continues free until the September deadline.