Relay.app is winding down. On July 16, 2026 it announced that new signups are closed, free accounts end August 15, 2026, and paid accounts end September 14, 2026. If you built workflows on Relay.app, the practical question is where to move them. The short answer: if you want your automations to keep running and to live next to your projects, agents, and data, Taskade Genesis is the strongest home. Start with Taskade Genesis free and rebuild your top workflows in one workspace.
Overall: ✅ Taskade Genesis for any team that wants automations to keep running inside a workspace that isn't shutting down. Relay.app was excellent at one slice of the job, human-in-the-loop approvals, and that is the strength to preserve when you migrate.
What is Taskade Genesis?
Taskade Genesis is the AI app builder inside the Taskade workspace. It is built on Workspace DNA: Memory (Projects), Intelligence (AI Agents), and Execution (Automations), a self-reinforcing loop where what your team does becomes the substrate the agents reason over. Founded in 2017 and backed by Y Combinator, Taskade serves over a million users and hosts a public Community Gallery of apps anyone can clone.
For a team leaving Relay.app, the important part is that automation is not a standalone tool here. A single prompt can produce an ops dashboard, a customer support portal, a CRM, an intake system, or an internal tool, with AI Agents and Automations already wired in. Automations trigger on external events, act through 100+ integrations, and write their results back into Projects that the whole team can see, review, and act on. There is no metered step counter and no separate run log you lose access to.
What is Relay.app?
Relay.app (relay.app) was a human-in-the-loop workflow automation tool. Its signature idea was oversight: approvals and human review were built cleanly into any workflow step, so a person could approve, edit, or reject an automated action before it continued. It also let you add AI steps for extraction, summarization, and text generation to any point in a flow, and it connected to more than 100 apps. It was founded by Jacob Bank, previously a director of product management at Google for Gmail and Google Calendar, and earlier the founder of Timeful, which Google acquired in 2015. Andreessen Horowitz led a $3.1 million round announced in October 2023 when the product reached general availability.
Relay.app status (July 2026): winding down. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are off. Free accounts close August 15, 2026 and paid accounts close September 14, 2026, both at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Workflows keep running through the wind-down, and paid users received extra steps and AI credits per month during it. Annual customers receive a prorated refund within five business days. You can export workflows, run history, and tables as CSV before the deadline; anything not exported is deleted. No acquisition or reason was announced.
Relay.app was a genuinely well-made product. The reason to read a comparison now is not to relitigate its quality, it is to answer a migration question: where should its human-in-the-loop automations go next?
Key Differences
Automation tool versus full workspace
Relay.app automated tasks. That was the whole product, and it did it cleanly. Taskade Genesis treats automation as one of three pillars. Automations here do not just fire and log a result, they write into Projects, hand steps to AI Agents, and update the same workspace your team already works in. When a Relay.app workflow finished, the output lived in a run history. When a Taskade Automation finishes, the output lives in your workspace where the next person, agent, or automation can pick it up.
Human-in-the-loop review
This is the one place Relay.app led, and it is worth being honest about. Relay.app was purpose-built around approval steps: pause a workflow, route it to a person, and continue only after they sign off. Taskade keeps a human in the loop a different way. An automation can create a task in a Project for a teammate to check, comment on, assign, and mark done before work continues, and AI Agents can ask for confirmation before they act. The dedicated approval-step UX was Relay.app's, but with Relay.app closing, the durable version of that review, one that keeps working and keeps the record, is the one that lives inside a workspace.
AI steps versus AI agents as teammates
Relay.app let you drop AI extraction, summarization, and text generation into a flow. Useful, and scoped to that flow. Taskade ships AI Agents v2 as first-class teammates with a large built-in toolset (web search, file analysis, code execution, image generation, and more), custom tools you define, and persistent memory that carries across projects. An automation can hand a step to an agent, and the same agent can be embedded publicly inside a Genesis App for your customers. The AI is not a step in a single workflow, it is a teammate that works across the whole workspace.
Integrations and where the work lives
Both connect to 100+ apps. The Taskade integrations are bidirectional: triggers pull events in (Slack messages, Gmail, Sheets rows, form submissions, webhooks) and actions push data out (Stripe checkouts, Notion syncs, Salesforce updates, GitHub changes). The difference is the destination. Relay.app moved data between apps. Taskade moves data between apps and into a workspace with 7 project views (List, Board, Calendar, Table, Mind Map, Gantt, Org Chart), real-time collaboration, and 7-tier role-based access, so the results are something your team can organize and act on, not just a log line.
Pricing model
Relay.app metered automated steps and AI credits. Even on paid tiers, a busy month could bump into the step or credit ceiling. Taskade is a flat subscription. Pro is $10 per month billed annually for unlimited apps and 10 seats, with no per-step meter on app builds. For a team that ran high automation volume on Relay.app, flat pricing removes the question of whether this month's runs will fit the plan.
What Relay.app Got Right (and Who It Was For)
Honest comparisons acknowledge genuine strengths. You would have chosen Relay.app if:
- Human-in-the-loop approvals were the point. Relay.app baked approval, edit, and reject steps into workflows more cleanly than most automation tools. If a person must sign off before an action runs, that design was best in class.
- You wanted an approachable Zapier alternative with AI steps. Relay.app was friendly for non-engineers, with AI extraction, summarization, and generation available as steps without code.
- You wanted oversight, not autonomy. Relay.app assumed a human should stay in control of automated work, which is exactly right for approvals, outreach, and anything customer-facing.
Those strengths are precisely what to look for in a replacement. New signups are now closed, so the practical move is to carry that human-in-the-loop discipline into a tool that will keep running.
Why Teams Choose Taskade
Taskade Genesis keeps your automations running inside a workspace that isn't shutting down. Automations feed Projects, Projects feed AI Agents, and the loop compounds instead of disappearing into a run log. Human review stays built in through tasks, comments, and agent confirmation, and pricing is flat instead of metered. The table below is the differentiation; the prose above is the context.
| After you migrate | Relay.app | Taskade Genesis |
|---|---|---|
| Runs after Sep 14, 2026 | Stops | Keeps running |
| Where results live | Run history (export to CSV) | Projects, reusable by every app and agent |
| Review | Approval steps in the flow | Tasks, comments, assignments, agent confirmation |
| AI | Steps in a workflow | AI Agents v2 with a large built-in toolset and memory |
| Pricing | Metered steps + AI credits | Flat subscription, unlimited apps |
Pricing and Total Cost
| Plan | Taskade Genesis | Relay.app (before wind-down) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free Forever, full app builder, limited AI credits | 200 steps + 500 AI credits per month |
| Entry | Pro $10 / month billed annually, unlimited apps, 10 seats | Professional $19 / month billed annually, 750 steps + 5,000 AI credits |
| Mid | Business $25 / month billed annually, unlimited seats | Team $69 / month billed annually, 2,000 steps, shared workflows |
| High end | Max $100 / month billed annually, maximum AI capacity | Add-on AI credit bundles up to $450 / month billed annually |
| Enterprise | $250 / month billed annually with custom SLA | Custom pricing, SOC2 and GDPR, priority support |
The headline math: Taskade Pro is $10 per month billed annually for 10 seats and unlimited app iterations, with no per-step meter. Relay.app Professional was $19 per month billed annually for one user with 750 steps and 5,000 AI credits, and heavier use pushed you to the Team plan plus credit add-ons. Beyond the sticker price, the real difference in 2026 is continuity: a Taskade subscription buys a workspace that keeps running, while a Relay.app subscription is being refunded on the way to September 14.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Relay.app shutting down in 2026?
Yes. Relay.app announced on July 16, 2026 that it is winding down. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades are off. Free accounts close August 15, 2026 and paid accounts close September 14, 2026, both at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Workflows keep running through the wind-down, annual customers receive a prorated refund within five business days, and any data you do not export is permanently deleted at the end.
What is the best Relay.app alternative in 2026?
For teams that want automations plus a place for the work to live, Taskade Genesis is the strongest destination. Relay.app was a single-purpose automation layer with human approval steps. Taskade Genesis is a full workspace where automations feed Projects, AI Agents, and 100+ bidirectional integrations, on flat pricing that starts free. If you want a like-for-like automation swap, see the Zapier, Make, and n8n comparisons.
How do I migrate my Relay.app workflows before it shuts down?
Export first. Relay.app lets you download your workflows, run history, and tables as CSV before the deadline. Then rebuild the workflows as Taskade Automations: pick a trigger to pull events in, add actions to push data out, and route any step that needs a person into a Project as a task your team approves. Start with your two or three highest-value workflows rather than porting everything at once.
Does Taskade Genesis support human-in-the-loop approvals?
Yes, through the workspace. Relay.app was purpose-built around approval steps, and that dedicated review UX was a genuine strength. In Taskade, review happens in your Projects: an automation can create a task for a teammate to check, comment on, assign, and mark done before work continues, and AI Agents can ask for confirmation before they act. The approval and the outcome both live in a durable workspace.
How much did Relay.app cost, and how much does Taskade cost?
Before it closed signups, Relay.app was Free (200 steps + 500 AI credits per month), Professional at $19 per month billed annually, Team at $69 per month billed annually, and Enterprise at custom pricing, all metered by steps and AI credits. Taskade is Free Forever, with Pro at $10 per month billed annually for unlimited apps and 10 seats, Business at $25, Max at $100, and Enterprise at $250, each billed annually.
Does Taskade Genesis include workflow automations and integrations?
Yes. Taskade includes durable workflow automations with 100+ bidirectional integrations across Slack, Gmail, Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Shopify, Google Sheets, and GitHub. Triggers pull external events in. Actions push data out. Automations can branch, filter, loop, and hand off to an AI Agent, and every result writes back into your workspace.
What did Relay.app do well?
Relay.app earned a loyal following for human-in-the-loop design. Approvals were baked cleanly into any step, so a person could approve, edit, or reject an automated action before it ran. It also let you add AI extraction, summarization, and generation as steps, and worked as an approachable Zapier alternative for teams that wanted oversight without code.
Can Taskade run AI steps inside an automation like Relay did?
Yes, and further. Relay.app let you add AI extraction, summarization, or generation as flow steps. Taskade ships AI Agents v2 as first-class teammates with a large built-in toolset, custom tools, and persistent memory. An automation can hand a step to an agent, and the same agent can be embedded publicly inside a Genesis App for your customers.
Will my automations keep running after Relay.app closes?
Not on Relay.app past September 14, 2026, which is why moving now matters. Rebuilt as a Taskade Automation, a workflow runs on a durable workspace. Because automations write into Projects, and Projects feed AI Agents, the work compounds instead of disappearing into a run log you can no longer reach.
Which AI models does Taskade Genesis use?
Taskade routes work across 15+ frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-weight providers. Routing is automatic and flexes by plan tier and task type, so you get a capable default without choosing a model for every step.
Can I use an approval step and an AI agent in the same workflow?
Yes. A Taskade Automation can hand a step to an AI Agent to draft or classify something, then create a review task in a Project so a teammate approves it before the next action runs. The Execution pillar is designed to mix automated steps, agent steps, and human checkpoints in one flow.
Move Your Workflows Home
Relay.app gave teams clean approvals and AI steps inside their automations. With it winding down, the goal is to keep that discipline in a tool that keeps running, and to put the results somewhere they compound. Taskade Genesis does both: automations, agents, and projects in one workspace, on flat pricing. ▲ Memory · ■ Intelligence · ● Execution. Build your workspace with Taskade Genesis and rebuild your top Relay.app workflows in an afternoon.
Migrate Relay-style workflows into a living app
Relay is shutting down. Rebuild approvals and sequences as Projects + agents + automations you own.
- Relay.app alternatives 2026
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- Or describe the workflow you need and Taskade Genesis builds it from that prompt
Explore Taskade Genesis
- AI App Builder: full apps from one prompt
- AI Agent Platform: digital teammates that work across your workspace
- Workflow Automation: bidirectional automations across 100+ integrations
- Automations & Execution: how triggers, actions, and review fit together
- Community Gallery: clone apps other teams have shipped
Related Comparisons
- Taskade vs Zapier: the classic automation swap
- Taskade vs Make: visual automation, compared
- Taskade vs n8n: for the self-host crowd
- Automation triggers and actions: the building blocks
- Pricing: flat plans, billed annually