Relay Is Shutting Down — Here’s Your Deadline to Get Out

TL;DR: Relay, the AI workflow automation tool that pitched itself as a friendlier Zapier, is closing. Free accounts lost access on 15 August. Paid accounts end on 14 September, and Relay says data is permanently deleted after your deadline unless you export it first. If you have a Relay automation running anything you care about, this is a diary job, not a reading job. Annual subscribers get an automatic prorated refund.

What happened

On 17 August 2026, TechCrunch reported that Relay is shutting down and that founder and CEO Jacob Bank is joining Google as VP of Product for Chrome, leading its product and developer relations teams. Some of the team goes with him. Relay launched in 2021 aiming to be a better Zapier; Bank had spent six years at Google before starting it.

No reason for the closure has been given. Bank’s own framing is about what comes next rather than what went wrong — “we have some really ambitious plans to help you work with AI in Chrome to get things done” — which tells you where the people went, but not why the product is being switched off.

The dates, from Relay’s own notice, are the part that matters:

Free accounts	access ended 15 August 2026
Paid accounts	access ends 14 September 2026
Your data	permanently deleted after your deadline unless exported
Annual subscriptions	automatic prorated refund, within 5 working days
Until then	existing workflows keep running normally

Relay does give you a proper way out. You can export workflows, sequences and MCP servers as JSON and as AI prompts — the second one specifically so you can hand them to another tool and rebuild — plus your run history and tables as CSV. That’s a more generous exit than a lot of shutdowns manage.

Why it matters if you don’t code

Relay isn’t in our tool matrix, so this may not be your tool. Read it anyway, because the pattern is the point.

In July we wrote about an AI app builder shutting down with six days’ notice and said plainly that consolidation would claim more small tools. Five weeks later, here’s another — and this one is in the automation category, which is where non-developers put the invisible work. Nobody notices an app disappearing more than the person whose invoicing, lead routing or client onboarding quietly ran on a Relay automation.

The uncomfortable detail is that a Relay automation is exactly the kind of thing you forget you built. An app you look at. A workflow you set up in March and haven’t opened since just works, until the day it doesn’t.

Credit where it’s due, though: 30 days for paying customers, a real export, and automatic refunds is a decent wind-down. Compared with six days’ notice, Relay has behaved well on the way out. That’s worth saying, because it’s the standard to hold the next one to.

What to do with your Relay automations

If you use Relay, in order:

1. Export today, not in September. Workflows, sequences and MCP servers as JSON and as AI prompts, plus run history and CSV tables. The prompts export is the one that makes rebuilding elsewhere quick.
2. Write down what each workflow actually does in plain English, before you lose the interface that explains it. Future you will not remember why step four exists.
3. Check what breaks when it stops. Follow each Relay automation to its endpoint — a spreadsheet, an inbox, a CRM. Anything downstream that silently depends on it needs a plan.
4. Rebuild the essential ones on Zapier or Make, both of which are on our matrix and are the obvious homes for this kind of work. Feed them your exported prompts as a starting point.
5. Don’t rebuild all of it. A shutdown is a free audit. Some of those workflows you’ll find you stopped needing months ago.
6. Claim nothing — refunds are automatic for annual plans, within five working days. If yours hasn’t appeared by then, chase it.

Who should care (and who shouldn’t)

• Running anything on Relay: the only group with a deadline. 14 September, then it’s gone.
• On Zapier, Make or n8n rather than a Relay automation: nothing to do today. Worth taking ten minutes to export your critical workflows anyway — the habit is the lesson here.
• Building apps rather than automations: unaffected, but the same principle applies to whatever holds your projects.
• Not started yet: ignore the drama. Pick a tool that fits what you’re building — the quiz does that in 60 seconds — and keep an export.

Our take

We don’t think this is a reason to panic about no-code tools generally. Relay raised money, built something people liked, and its founder took a big job. That’s an ordinary startup outcome, not a warning about the category.

What it does confirm is the thing we said in July: the small, well-loved tool is the one that disappears, and automation is the worst place for that to happen because the work is invisible until it stops. Our advice hasn’t changed and won’t: build where you can export, export before you need to, and keep a plain-English note of what each thing does.

If you’re moving, we’d point you at Zapier or Make rather than something newer and cleverer. After the week you’ve had, boring and well-funded is a feature.

Not sure which tool fits what you’re building? Take the 60-second Vibe Coding Tool Finder quiz →

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