Relay.app Is Shutting Down: The Alternative for Marketing Teams [2026]
On July 16, Relay.app told its customers it's winding down. Free accounts and their data get deleted after August 15. Paid accounts run through September 14, with prorated refunds and a 60-day credit bump to help people move. You can export your workflows, sequences, and MCP servers as JSON and prompts, then rebuild them somewhere else.
I want to say the honest thing first: this one stings. Relay.app was the kind of product people genuinely loved. AI-native from the ground up, a chat-based builder that non-technical teams could actually use, and human-in-the-loop controls that made AI outputs something you could trust instead of something you had to babysit. That's hard to build and rare to get right.
I never used it in production, so I won't pretend to know exactly why the plug got pulled. But the shape of it is familiar. Great product, real users, and the runway ran out before profitability did. That's the VC game. You win or you lose, and patience usually isn't on the menu. It's a shame, because with a lower burn rate a team like that probably turns it around. Good companies disappear that shouldn't.
None of that helps you if you've got live workflows to move before your data gets deleted. So let's be useful.
First, answer one question: what were you actually using Relay for?
Relay.app was a horizontal automation platform. It connected to 200-plus apps and let you wire together more or less anything: internal ops, approvals, data cleanup, notifications, plus marketing and sales. Because it did everything, "what's the replacement?" doesn't have one answer. It has two.
If you used Relay for general operations — routing internal requests, syncing tools, approval chains, back-office glue — your replacement is another horizontal automation tool. Zapier, Make, n8n, or Gumloop will map closest to what you built. Export your JSON, rebuild the workflows, done. MarketBetter is not the right tool for automating your HR approval flow, and I'm not going to pretend it is.
If you used Relay to run marketing and outbound — enriching leads, building audiences, personalizing outreach, sending sequences, chasing follow-ups, reacting to buyer signals — then rebuilding all of that as a pile of workflow blocks in the next generic automation tool is the wrong move. That's where MarketBetter comes in, and it's a genuinely better answer than a like-for-like swap.
The rest of this guide is for that second group.
The difference between a workflow builder and a purpose-built system
Here's the core distinction, and it's the whole reason to consider MarketBetter instead of just moving your blocks to the next canvas.
A workflow builder gives you an empty canvas and a box of connectors. You are the architect. You decide what a good outbound motion looks like, you wire every step, you maintain it when an API changes, and you own every gap between the blocks. That flexibility is the point, and for a lot of jobs it's exactly right.
But marketing and outbound aren't a blank canvas problem. They're a solved-shape problem. Almost every B2B team is trying to do the same core thing: figure out who is worth reaching, and what to do about them. A workflow builder hands you a canvas and wishes you luck. A purpose-built system already knows the shape of the job and does the assembly for you.
That's the one line I'd tattoo on this whole category:
MarketBetter tells you WHO and WHAT TO DO. A generic workflow tool just runs the steps you already figured out yourself.
When you rebuild your Relay marketing workflows as raw automation blocks somewhere else, you're re-solving a problem that's already been solved — and you're signing up to maintain that solution forever. When you move to a purpose-built platform, the who-and-what-to-do engine comes standard.
What you rebuild by hand vs. what comes standard
If you're mapping your old Relay marketing automations to their replacements, here's the honest side-by-side.
| What you built in Relay | Rebuild in a generic automation tool | In MarketBetter |
|---|---|---|
| "Find companies that fit our ICP" | Chain enrichment APIs, dedupe, filter | Describe your ICP in chat, get an audience |
| "Identify who's visiting our site" | Wire a visitor-ID vendor + resolution logic | Built-in visitor identification |
| "Personalize the first-touch message" | Prompt an LLM step per contact, manage context | Personalization tied to the actual signal |
| "Send across email and LinkedIn" | Separate connectors, separate logic, separate limits | One multi-channel outreach engine |
| "Follow up when someone replies or goes quiet" | Build branching logic and timers by hand | Signal-driven follow-ups and next-best-action |
| "Keep humans in the loop on approvals" | Add manual approval steps | Review and approval where it matters |
Notice the pattern. The thing Relay users loved — human-in-the-loop, AI that assists instead of running wild — isn't something you have to give up. It's how MarketBetter is designed to work too. The difference is you're not hand-assembling the marketing motion around it. The motion is the product.
What "purpose-built for marketing" actually buys you
Concretely, here's what you stop maintaining the day you move a marketing use case off a workflow canvas and onto MarketBetter.
Audience building without the plumbing. In Relay you'd chain enrichment and filtering steps to assemble a target list. In MarketBetter you describe who you want in plain language and get a real audience back — the same chat-first ease Relay was praised for, pointed at the marketing job specifically. If you liked building Relay workflows by describing them, this will feel familiar.
Signals, not just triggers. A workflow trigger fires when an event happens. A buying signal tells you something changed in the market and what it means for outreach. MarketBetter is built around real-time signals — including website visitor identification — so the system reacts to intent, not just to a webhook you set up.
Multi-channel out of the box. Running email and LinkedIn as two hand-wired branches in a workflow tool is a maintenance tax. MarketBetter treats outbound as one motion across channels, with the personalization and sequencing built in rather than bolted on.
Personalization anchored to why you're reaching out. Dropping an LLM step into a workflow gives you generated text. Tying the message to the actual signal that surfaced the lead gives you relevance — the difference between "an AI wrote this" and "this is clearly about me."
The next action, decided for you. This is the part generic tools never solve, because it isn't a connector problem. When a prospect replies, goes cold, or shows new intent, MarketBetter surfaces what to do next. A workflow tool can only do what you pre-scripted. If you want the deeper version of this idea, our take on using AI for lead generation and AI marketing automation walks through it.
Being fair to Relay — and to the alternatives
I'm not going to trash a product on its way out, and I'm not going to oversell mine. So, straight:
Relay.app was better than MarketBetter at being a general-purpose automation platform, because that's what it was. If your Relay account was mostly internal ops and integrations, MarketBetter is the wrong replacement — go look at general marketing automation tooling or a horizontal builder. I'd rather tell you that than win a customer who churns in a month.
But if your Relay account was where your marketing and outbound lived, moving to another blank canvas just re-creates the maintenance burden you had. MarketBetter is purpose-built for exactly that job, which means less to wire, less to babysit, and a system that already knows the shape of good B2B outreach. That's a better trade for a marketing team than "same DIY work, new logo." For the fuller landscape, we keep an updated view of the best AI marketing tools and where each one fits.
There's also a quieter reason to prefer a focused tool right now. The last year has been consolidation season — HubSpot absorbed Warmly, Clearbit became a suite feature, and now a beloved independent is shutting down. Betting your GTM motion on a tool whose whole company is aimed at your problem is a different kind of bet than betting on a feature inside someone else's roadmap.
How to migrate before your data is deleted
You've got a hard deadline, so move in this order:
- Export everything from Relay now. Pull your workflows, sequences, and MCP configs as JSON and prompts while you still have access. Do this today — free accounts are gone after August 15.
- Sort your exports into two buckets: general ops vs. marketing/outbound. Ops goes to a horizontal tool. Marketing/outbound is your MarketBetter candidate list.
- Map each marketing workflow to a job, not a set of steps. "Enrich and message net-new ICP accounts" is a job. Don't rebuild your ten Relay steps — hand the job to a system built to do it.
- Bring a human-in-the-loop mindset with you. The thing you liked about Relay — reviewing AI output before it goes out — is a first-class idea in MarketBetter too. You don't have to trade trust for automation.
- Run one motion end to end before you cut over. Pick your highest-value marketing use case, stand it up in MarketBetter, and prove it before the September 14 paid deadline.
The bottom line
Relay.app shutting down is a real loss, and if you built on it, you have my genuine sympathy and a real deadline. For general automation, grab a horizontal tool and rebuild your JSON. But for the marketing and outbound work — the who-to-reach and what-to-say engine at the center of your GTM — don't rebuild blocks on a new canvas. Move to something that already knows the job.
That's what MarketBetter is for: it tells your team who's worth reaching and exactly what to do next, instead of handing you an empty workflow and wishing you luck.
Moving off Relay.app before the deadline? Book a demo and we'll help you map your marketing use cases across in one session.