Relay.app announced on July 16, 2026 that it is winding down. Free accounts lose access on August 15, 2026; paying customers on September 14, 2026. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are already turned off. This page is written by the makers of HitLai, which is one of the options below — listed last, as it should be, so you can weigh the rest first.
Before anything else, export — and read what Relay.app's own docs say, because the parts that cost you are easy to miss. The export can take up to 24 hours to generate, and the emailed download link is live for only 48 hours, so do not start this on your cut-off date. The JSON is not the migration artifact: Relay.app says different builders use different JSON structures and that the export is not perfectly transferrable to other tools without AI interpretation first, and recommends the generated build prompt instead — it is already in the same .zip. Rebuild from the prompt, not the JSON. Two more things go quietly: workflow screenshots are not part of the workspace export, so save those deliberately if you want a visual record, and run-history CSVs truncate at 100,000 rows. What you do get is a folder per workflow, sequence, MCP server and table — the build prompt, run history, the workflow JSON, and tables as CSVs. At the end of the wind-down your workspace, user accounts, app credentials and tokens are deleted automatically. Annual customers are receiving an automatic prorated refund for the unused period, typically within five business days.
Relay.app was genuinely good at the thing it is remembered for, and any replacement should be judged against it: a real pause that stops the run until a person decides — not a notification after the fact — with enough context inline that the reviewer can approve, reject, or edit without opening the app.
If you need a very long tail of apps and approvals were occasional: Zapier now ships a built-in Human in the Loop capability. A Request Approval action pauses the Zap while one or more reviewers approve, decline, or change the data submitted for review; approvals can arrive by email or Slack. It is available on Pro plans and higher, and each Human in the Loop action counts as a task. If you're already deep in Zapier that's the smallest change to make — though your Zaps also run as a step inside HitLai, so the catalogue itself isn't a reason to stay.
If you have engineering skill and want to own the stack: n8n is source-available and self-hostable, and its gates are enforced at the tool level rather than only the workflow level — an AI agent can search a knowledge base freely while risky actions like sending an email or updating a record wait for a person. Approval requests can go out over Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram and other channels.
If what you actually wanted was an assistant that never acts on its own: Lindy's per-action Ask for Confirmation toggle parks side-effecting work as a draft and waits. HitLai ships an assistant too — your own agent, with a personality and a memory, driving the same platform your team runs on, and every action it takes crosses the same approval gate.
And ours, last: HitLai. If approvals were the reason you were on Relay.app — rather than an extra on top of app-to-app plumbing — this is the closest thing on the list to what you had. Approval workflows are their own resource, ordered and multi-step; each step routes to a named person, a role, or a group, with required flags, timeouts, and conditions; a reviewer can approve, reject, or delegate to someone else, with the reason recorded either way; and requests arrive over Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or email, with approve and reject available straight from Slack. Beyond the gate itself, people and AI are peers in one model: a teammate carries a real capacity signal — current workload, availability, track record — so a run can hand work to someone who can actually take it and say why it picked them, and the work lands as a task carrying its context.
Every decision lands in a timestamped, tamper-evident audit trail — each decision chained to the one before it with a SHA-256 hash — so ‘who approved this, and when’ still has an answer months later, and an altered row stops reconciling. The trust dial is set at the organization, department, workflow, or individual-agent level rather than as one global switch, so you can hold anything customer-facing to a hard stop while internal reporting runs itself.
And integration is never the roadblock. Native connectors for the tools you already run — Slack, Teams, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, QuickBooks, Jira. When no native connector exists, HitLai builds one on the fly against the API, or drives the browser directly. There is no catalogue to run out of. And you can keep what already works: Zapier, n8n, Make, Power Automate and IFTTT each run as a node inside a HitLai workflow once that platform's credential is connected, so this does not have to be a rebuild. What HitLai is built around is work that touches customers or money — the AI drafts the deliverable itself, from your business's own data, and a trust dial decides what flows through and what waits for a person. One difference: where Relay.app let a reviewer edit the draft inline at the approval step, HitLai sends it back with a reason to re-draft, so the edit stays attributable to the drafter.
Whichever you pick, judge it on the mechanic Relay.app got right: a real pause that stops the run until a person decides, with enough context inline to decide well. The shutdown adds a second question worth asking, though — trust, not capability, is the real ceiling on automation, and that now includes trusting that the tool holding your approvals will still be there next year. Check you can get your workflows back out of whatever you move to.