Relay.app built its workflow tool around a human approval step

The setup

Relay.app marketed itself, in a snapshot of its homepage preserved by the Wayback Machine from June 2025, as a way to create AI agents that work for you by connecting Gmail, Slack, Notion and more than 100 other apps inside a visual builder, aimed at non-developers building their own workflows rather than IT teams. Setting up a workflow required no code: a person built a flow from triggers and steps on a canvas, the same interface Relay used for both ordinary automation and its AI features. The company's own live site now carries a different notice: relay.app confirms Relay is shutting down, with paid accounts and data set for deletion after 14 September 2026, so the setup this note describes is one a reader can no longer sign up for.

What the documents show

An archived snapshot of Relay's own features page states the workflow builder is designed around what it calls Human-in-the-Loop steps, listing several types: an approval step that will pause a run until the selected assignee gives their go-ahead, a data-input request sent over email or Slack, a manual path selection, and a task assignment. The same archived homepage describes this as letting a person bring in a teammate to review the work of AI when it matters, pairing an AI-generated step with a named reviewer rather than running the result unattended. This is Relay's own description of its product design, not a third party's characterization of it.

The friction

The approval mechanism the documents describe depends entirely on a person being available and willing to respond over email or Slack when a run pauses; neither archived page discloses what happens to a stalled run if the assigned reviewer never answers. The larger disclosed friction is on the live site today: the shutdown notice states free accounts and their data are deleted 30 days after the announcement and paid accounts 60 days after, meaning any workflow built around these approval steps needed migrating on a vendor-set deadline, a cost the original feature pages never mention.

What changed in the work

The archived documents support a specific claim about what Relay changed for a non-technical builder: instead of choosing between a fully automated action and doing the task by hand, a person could insert a reviewable checkpoint into an otherwise automated flow. The editorial read of the ending is a kept-or-dropped case in miniature — the human-in-the-loop pattern is not what failed here; the vendor offering it did, and workflows built to depend on that vendor's specific approval steps had to be dropped or exported by an externally imposed date.

• If a workflow depends on a specific vendor's approval mechanism, what is the exit plan if that vendor shuts down?
• Who is the named assignee for each approval step, and do they know they are one?
• Can the workflow's logic and history actually be exported in a usable format before an announced deletion date?

A product built entirely around a human checkpoint is, by its own design, dependent on people staying reachable — and, this case shows, dependent on the vendor staying in business too.