Relay.app Is Shutting Down: Your Migration Plan and the Alternative to Move To

Relay.app announced its shutdown on July 16, 2026. Free plans stop working on August 15; paid plans end September 14, and new signups are already disabled. This is a migration guide, not a eulogy — below is what happened, the two dates that matter, and how to move your scheduled reports, approval steps, and multi-app handoffs to Sterling, an AI coworker in Slack that does the job itself and checks with you before anything leaves your business or can't be undone, before the paid deadline arrives in mid-September.

What happened, and the two dates that matter

On July 16, 2026, Relay.app told its customers it's winding down. Signups are closed. There are two hard cutoffs:

August 15, 2026 — free plans stop working.
September 14, 2026 — paid plans stop working.

After September 14, every recurring job Relay was quietly running comes back to your plate — the Monday report, the follow-up chasers, the lead that was supposed to land in the CRM without you touching it. None of that migrates itself. You have under two months of paid runway, and the smart move is to start the overlap this week, while Relay is still live to compare against.

First, the part nobody's saying

If you paid for Relay, you didn't choose badly. You chose in a category that's still shaking out: 5,600 AI startups closed between January 2025 and March 2026. Tools vanishing under you is the whole market's risk right now, not a judgment error on your part.

And Relay got something right that most of this category still hasn't. It put a person in the middle of the automation — a step where a human checks the work before it ships. If you picked Relay, you picked it at least partly for that. You wanted automation you could see and stop. That instinct was correct, and you should keep it.

Here's the deeper thing the shutdown just taught you. What owners actually want out of this software isn't the software. "Small businesses do not want to have an automation platform at all they want a system that keeps on running by itself," a Reddit owner put it. Another said the quiet part about reliability: "The best automation is the one people can actually keep using without calling someone every week." You didn't want to log into Relay. You wanted the work to keep happening. That's the thing to protect through this move.

Why the move isn't to another builder

The obvious next step is to recreate every workflow in Zapier, Make, or n8n. Before you spend August doing that, hear what their own customers say about the deal.

"i could have done the entire task i'm trying to automate with the time i've spent trying to get zapier," wrote a Trustpilot reviewer. On the fragility of wired-up flows, a Reddit owner: "A zap breaks, a field changes, or the account runs out of zaps and it is no longer set and forget." You'd spend the runway learning a new canvas, re-wiring twelve-step flows, and re-breaking things the next field rename will break again. (If you do want a builder, Zapier Agents is the honest place to look — just go in knowing it's a canvas you maintain.)

So here's the reframe. Don't replace your workflow tool. Replace what the workflows were for. The reports, the drafts, the CRM updates — those are jobs. Move the jobs, not the plumbing.

How your Relay workflows map to Sterling

Sterling is an AI coworker that lives in your Slack. There's no canvas and there are no flows to rebuild, because there are no flows — there are jobs you delegate in plain English. If Relay ran it, you can say it to Sterling in one message. The common moves, including the three Relay was best at — approval steps, scheduled runs, and multi-app handoffs:

Your Relay workflow did this	You tell Sterling this
Ran a scheduled report, assembled and sent weekly	"Build the Monday report from Shopify and Klaviyo, every Monday at 8."
Drafted an email, then waited for a person to approve it	"Draft the win-back campaign in our voice. I'll say go before it sends."
Handed data between apps and flagged mismatches	"Cross-check Shopify against QuickBooks and flag anything that doesn't line up."
Captured leads and pushed them into the CRM	"Pull the new leads, clean them up, and log them in the CRM."
Chased people for follow-ups on a schedule	"Turn this thread into action items and chase the follow-ups until they're done."

Every row ends the same way: the finished work shows up in the Slack thread. The internal jobs you asked for — the report, the CRM update — just get done. Anything that leaves your business or can't be undone — a send, a charge, a delete — waits for your go. Recurring jobs run on schedule — and that go-gate holds every single time, run after run.

The Relay.app alternative that doesn't need a rebuild

Sterling keeps the instinct you chose Relay for and sharpens it. You type the job in plain English. Sterling connects to your stack — Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta and Google Ads, QuickBooks, your CRM, 3,000+ apps — does the work, and posts the finished output in the thread. Then the part you'll recognize: the internal jobs you asked for just happen, but anything that leaves your business or can't be undone — a send, a post, a charge, a delete — waits for your go. You reply "go" in the thread. It executes. It's logged.

A Reddit owner wrote the acceptance test for this whole category: "if there's no exception queue, audit log, and big red pause button, it's not automation, it's just a faster way to lose money." Sterling is built as exactly that — the whole job runs in a Slack thread you can watch, every action lands in the audit log, nothing gets sent, charged, or deleted without your go, and pause or cancel is a dashboard button. Plus something Relay didn't shape this way: each teammate's access is off, view, or full, per tool, set by you.

Sterling does everything up to the send. The send is yours.

The price is the part you can budget in your head. $50 a month gets your whole team a coworker — 20,000 credits that cover the jobs you actually delegate: the weekly audit, the campaign drafts, the CRM updates. No per-seat charges. Run low? Sterling pings you in Slack at 80%, before it matters, and a top-up is $25 for 10,000 credits — decided by you, not discovered on an invoice. If credits run out, Sterling pauses and tells you. It pauses; it never surprise-bills you.

Your migrate-this-week checklist

Three steps. Do the first today — you have runway until September 14, and you should use every day of the overlap.

1. Today — add Sterling to your Slack and connect your apps. Minutes, no code, no IT contractor. Shopify, Klaviyo, your ads accounts, QuickBooks, your CRM. 2. This week — hand over your most important Relay job first. The Monday report is the best test, because you know exactly what Relay produced and exactly how long it takes by hand. Watch the finished version arrive in the thread. Say go. 3. Before September 14 — move the rest while Relay still runs. Keep Relay live and run Sterling next to it. Compare outputs side by side. Cancel nothing until Sterling has done every job at least once. The overlap costs you $0 — that's what the first 20,000 free credits are for.

The full side-by-side, with every Relay cell held to the verified shutdown record, lives on the Relay.app alternative page.

Direct Operating Answer

The takeaway: You don't have to rebuild your Relay workflows. Relay's real value was continuity plus a human check before anything shipped — move both, not the plumbing. Describe each job to Sterling in one Slack message, keep your go on every send, and the work Relay ran keeps running. The dates are the only fixed points: August 15 for free plans, September 14 for paid.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Relay.app really shutting down, and when exactly?

Yes. Relay.app announced its shutdown on July 16, 2026, and disabled new signups. Free plans stop working on August 15, 2026; paid plans stop working on September 14, 2026. After the paid cutoff, the recurring jobs Relay ran are yours again unless you've moved them somewhere that keeps running.

Do I have to rebuild my Relay workflows somewhere else?

No — and this is the part that surprises people. Sterling has no workflow canvas to rebuild them in. You describe the job in a Slack message — what to pull, what to build, when to run — and Sterling does it. A workflow that took an evening to wire in a builder takes a sentence to delegate. Moving your recurring work is an afternoon, not an August.

I picked Relay for the approval step. Does Sterling have that?

Yes, and it's the center of the product, not a step you add. The internal jobs you delegate — the report, the CRM record you asked it to update — just get done. But anything that leaves your business or can't be undone — a send, a post, a charge, a delete — waits for your go, a plain reply in the Slack thread where the work happened. Each teammate's access is off, view, or full, per tool, set by you. Every action is logged. It's the exact instinct that made you choose Relay, sharpened per person and per tool.

How do I know Sterling won't shut down too?

Fair question — you just lived it, and we're not going to answer with a promise nobody can honestly make. What we can say comes with mechanisms: there's no contract and no annual lock-in — Sterling is month to month, and cancel is a dashboard button. Nothing is held hostage, either, because there are no proprietary flows to export. Your delegations are plain-English asks and your data lives in your own apps. The switching cost out of Sterling is one Slack message. Run it next to Relay free, and judge it by what it finishes.

What does Sterling cost, and what happens when credits run out?

$50 a month = 20,000 credits for your whole workspace, unlimited seats — everyone can delegate, and the credits cover the jobs you hand over. No per-seat charges. If you run low, Sterling alerts you in Slack at 80%; a top-up is $25 for 10,000 credits. If credits run out, Sterling pauses and tells you — it never keeps spending in the background. Your first 20,000 credits are free, and they run on your real stack, not a demo store.

The work Relay was doing doesn't have to stop. It has to move — and moving it is one Slack message. Add Sterling this week, hand it your Monday report, and run it next to Relay until September 14. Move My First Relay Job Free — 20,000 Credits.