Relay.app is shutting down. If you're a Relay user, these two dates are the only ones that matter: August 15, 2026 for accounts on the free plan and September 14, 2026 for paying customers. Both end in permanent data deletion. New signups and upgrades are already off.
No reason was given publicly, and Relay has not recommended a destination. What we can tell you is where Brazenly fits as a Relay.app alternative. Brazenly is Bay Leaf Digital's AI workflow platform for marketing teams, built for the kind of company that picked Relay in the first place: one that treats "a human should look at this before it goes out" as a first-class part of the workflow, not an afterthought.
What Will Relay Users Miss?
Relay earned its pitch of "workflow automation beyond triggers and actions." A handful of things it did don't have clean equivalents in the obvious replacements, and if you're evaluating where to land next, these are the capabilities worth tracking.
- Human-in-the-loop (HITL) as a real primitive. Four distinct step types (Approvals, Get data input, task completions, and Path selection), actionable across Slack, web, desktop, and mobile, included on every plan.
- Sequences. Reusable sub-workflows shared across a team. Build a block once, call it from 20 workflows, update it in one place.
- Bundled AI credits across GPT, Claude, and Gemini. No juggling provider keys.
- Agents. AI teammates that owned a set of workflows, like a "Customer Support Agent" or "Personal Assistant."
Relay also supported paths that could merge inside a single workflow and included every integration on every plan, with no premium-connector gating. These weren't fringe features. They were the architecture that let teams build complex, reusable workflows without hitting paywalls or duplicating effort. If HITL and Sequences were the reasons you chose Relay, this is the list you want your next tool to cover.
Where Do the Obvious Replacements Fall Short?
The general-purpose automation field is well-covered. What isn't well-covered is HITL. Most tools either paywall it, hide it in beta, or don't have a real primitive at all.
| Tool | The Gap for Relay Users |
|---|---|
| Zapier | Approval action is premium-tier only, and reviewers need a Zapier account |
| Make | HITL app is Enterprise-only and in closed beta |
| n8n | Only tool with an email-based approval, but you're self-hosting |
| Gumloop | No approval primitive |
| Lindy | No approval primitive; no free tier |
| Activepieces | No approval primitive; smaller connector ecosystem |
| Rills | Does approvals well, but only approvals; won't absorb your other workflows |
Read that list twice and the pattern shows up. The general-purpose tools don't take HITL seriously. The tools that take HITL seriously don't do the rest. That's the gap we built Brazenly for. These characterizations are based on each tool's published documentation and pricing as of August 2026.
Where Does Brazenly Fit as a Relay.app Alternative?
Brazenly brings structured workflows, typed agents, and human review into one operations platform. It's built and used daily by Bay Leaf Digital on real client workflows since 2024. We've driven 500% organic traffic growth for B2B SaaS clients in 6 months, and we built Brazenly to run the marketing workflows behind results like that.
Each Relay capability maps to a Brazenly equivalent, and several go further.
HITL That Goes Further Than Relay's Did
All four of Relay's HITL patterns are here as first-class step types, and one pattern goes further than anything else on the market.
- Review step for approvals. You assign a reviewer, choose single or multi-reviewer mode, and toggle "require all approvals."
- Form step for Get data input. You collect structured input from a teammate mid-workflow and pass it downstream, with standard-form or wizard layouts.
- Team assignment on any step for task completions. You assign a specific person to a specific step, with their avatar on the workflow and toast notifications when the step is theirs.
- Edge conditions for Path selection. You route branches by Always, On Success, On Failure, or Custom logic.
Then there's the one thing nobody else in this space does: the audit-agent-to-comments pattern in AI Writing. A workflow generates a draft, an audit agent flags problems (brand voice, factual accuracy, citation checks), and the flags load as inline comments a human resolves in the editor before the workflow continues. It looks like editing a shared doc with a colleague. The automation disappears.
Sequences, Upgraded for Teams
Reusable pieces are the Agent Library and the Workflow Library. Build once, promote to the library, and import into other projects with immutable versioning, decimal versioning for imports (v2.1, v2.2), and update banners when a source has changed. Local modifications don't break sync. Your team can update a workflow in one place and see the change propagate everywhere it's used.
Bundled AI Across Providers, Plus BYO
Run any model from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google at the agent level, with per-step model choice across a single workflow. Bring your own API key if you want direct provider billing, or pick a different model per step in the same workflow. You get the flexibility of multi-provider access without the overhead of managing separate accounts.
Agents
Use live agents for conversational, one-to-one tasks, or loop agents for batch processing with structured output. A teammate can hand off a task conversationally while batch processes run in the background. Both live in the shared Agent Library so a "Customer Support Agent" or "Personal Assistant" you build is available to your whole team, versioned and updatable.
Paths That Merge
The workflow builder is a React Flow graph, so branches can rejoin inside a single workflow without duplicate versions. You can build conditional logic that splits and reconverges, keeping your workflow count low and your logic in one place.
No Premium-Connector Gating
Same posture as Relay. Integrations aren't paywalled by tier. HubSpot, Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, WordPress, ClickUp, Google Drive, SharePoint, Slack, and GA4 all ship with real read and write operations, including live campaign updates, marketing email drafts, and CMS publishing. This is the marketing-ops depth that general-purpose automation tools don't reach.
Team and Individual Agent Operations
Everything lives inside an Account to Project to Workspace hierarchy with hard isolation between projects. For agencies, that means clean separation between client work. For in-house teams, clean separation between initiatives, business units, or brands. Individual use still works: one person can run Live agents and workflows without touching the team features until they need them.
One honest concession: Brazenly doesn't currently offer a custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) server builder the way Relay did. If that was essential to your setup, that specific capability isn't here. Almost everything else is.
How Do Relay and Brazenly Compare at a Glance?
This side-by-side mapping shows each Relay capability next to its Brazenly equivalent, so you can scan coverage without rereading the detail above. The table covers all ten capability areas, from HITL primitives to integration pricing. Use it as a quick reference when you're comparing options or building your migration checklist.
| What Relay Did | Where Brazenly Lands |
|---|---|
| Approvals step | Review step, single or multi-reviewer, assign specific teammates |
| Get data input (forms) | Form step, feeds downstream steps |
| Task completions | Team assignment on any workflow step |
| Path selection | Edge conditions (Always, On Success, On Failure, Custom) |
| Sequences (reusable sub-workflows) | Agent Library + Workflow Library with immutable versioning and sync |
| Bundled multi-model credits | Multi-provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) + BYO API key, per-step model choice |
| Agents (AI teammates) | Live agents (conversational) and Loop agents (batch) |
| Paths that merge | React Flow builder with branches that rejoin |
| No premium-connector gating | Same posture, no per-connector paywall |
| Custom MCP server builder | Not currently offered |
For teams evaluating a Relay.app alternative, the table confirms what the section above laid out in detail. Nine of ten Relay capabilities have direct Brazenly equivalents, and several go further. The one gap, custom MCP server building, is honest and specific: if you relied on it, you'll need a different tool for that piece. For everything else, the migration path is clear.
Brazenly Is Accepting a Limited Number of Signups
We're not chasing volume. We onboard teams we can support, which means we're taking on a limited number of new customers at a time, with real attention to helping you migrate what matters.
If Relay's shutdown is forcing your hand, or if you've been evaluating Brazenly as a Relay.app alternative for structured AI workflows and human review, get in touch with us. Tell us what your Relay setup looked like: the workflows that can't fail, the approvals that matter, the teammates who need to see what before it ships. We'll tell you honestly whether Brazenly is a fit, what a migration would look like, and how quickly we can bring you on.
