Relay.app

Relay.app is a workflow automation platform designed for teams that want AI and human judgment working together. You build automations in a visual editor, add AI steps that can summarise, classify, or extract data, and insert human approval checkpoints where a person needs to review before the workflow continues.

The distinguishing idea behind Relay is that most automation tools assume you want to remove humans from a process entirely. Relay takes the position that some steps genuinely need human judgment — and builds first-class support for those moments into the platform rather than treating them as exceptions.

What does Relay.app do?

Relay.app connects your SaaS tools into automated sequences that run on triggers: a new lead in HubSpot, an email arriving in Gmail, a form submission in Typeform, a webhook from any external service. From that trigger, you define a workflow — a series of steps that run in order, with conditional branches, loops, and parallel paths as needed.

What separates Relay from basic automation tools is the ability to mix three kinds of steps in the same workflow:

AI steps let you call GPT-4o, Claude, or Gemini inside a workflow without managing API keys. You can ask the model to summarise an email, classify a support ticket into categories, extract structured data from unstructured text, or draft a reply — and the output flows into the next step automatically.

Human steps pause the workflow and send a review request to a person via email or Slack. The reviewer sees the AI’s output, can approve it, edit it, or send it back, and then the workflow resumes. This is what Relay calls human-in-the-loop: not removing humans from the process, but giving them a fast, low-friction way to apply judgment at exactly the right moment.

Integration steps connect to apps — over 100 integrations including Gmail, Slack, HubSpot, Notion, Google Drive, Stripe, Airtable, and more — plus webhooks and HTTP requests for anything not on the list.

Who uses Relay.app?

Relay is aimed at small business owners, operations teams, consultants, and non-technical professionals who want to automate repetitive work without writing code. The visual builder is accessible enough that someone with no programming background can build useful automations; the AI steps reduce the need for complex scripting even for tasks that involve unstructured data.

It is well suited to teams in roles like sales operations, customer success, marketing, recruiting, and executive assistance — anywhere that involves high volumes of similar tasks with occasional edge cases that need human attention. Zapier and Make.com users who want AI built into their automations, or who want the ability to pause a workflow for human review, often move to Relay for those capabilities.

How does Relay.app work?

Relay runs as a managed cloud service — your workflows are hosted on Relay’s infrastructure and run in response to triggers without you managing any servers. You connect your apps by authenticating through OAuth or API keys in the Relay interface, then build workflows in the visual editor.

When a trigger fires — say, a new email arrives matching a filter — Relay starts a workflow run. Each step executes in sequence: an AI step calls the selected model via Relay’s managed integration, a human step sends a review request and waits for a response, an integration step calls the target app’s API. If a step fails, Relay retries automatically and logs the error for debugging.

The human-in-the-loop mechanism works through email or Slack notifications. When a workflow reaches a human step, it pauses and sends a message to the designated reviewer. The reviewer sees the relevant context inline and has buttons to approve, reject, or edit. Clicking a button resumes or stops the workflow. Relay tracks the waiting run in the dashboard so you can see which workflows are pending human action and for how long.

Relay bills by workflow runs rather than tasks, which means a complex multi-step workflow counts as one run rather than separately billing each step.

Relay.app use cases

AI-assisted email triage and response. A customer success team receives inbound email queries. A Relay workflow triggers on each new email, sends it to an AI step that drafts a reply, routes the draft to the relevant team member for review via Slack, and sends the approved reply from the team member’s Gmail account. The human step takes 30 seconds; the AI step eliminates the blank-page problem for every response.

Lead enrichment and qualification. A new contact is added to HubSpot. A Relay workflow fetches company information, runs an AI classification step to score the lead against ICP criteria, updates the contact record with a score and summary, and routes high-scoring leads to a sales rep for immediate follow-up via Slack — with a human approval step before any outreach is sent.

Content moderation and approval. A marketing team uses AI to draft social posts or ad copy. A Relay workflow generates the draft, sends it to a content reviewer for approval, and publishes to the relevant platform only after sign-off. The AI does the drafting; the human does the quality and brand check.

Invoice processing. A finance team receives invoices via email. A Relay workflow extracts the vendor, amount, and due date from the invoice using an AI extraction step, checks it against a spreadsheet of approved vendors, routes unexpected invoices to a human for review, and automatically creates the payment record for approved invoices. The human only sees the exceptions.

Is Relay.app free?

Relay has a free plan that includes 200 automated workflow runs per month and 500 AI credits, with access to all integrations and a single user. This is enough to build and test a meaningful workflow and see how the platform works in practice.

Paid plans start at $19 per month for the Professional tier (750 runs, 5,000 AI credits, priority polling for faster trigger response times). The Team plan is $138 per month for up to 10 users with 2,000 runs and shared workflows and app connections. Add-on blocks of runs and AI credits are available on all paid plans if you exceed the included amounts.

All plans include access to the full integration library and human-in-the-loop steps — these are not gated behind higher tiers.

How to get started with Relay.app

Sign up at relay.app — no credit card required on the free plan. After signing in, connect the first app you want to automate (Gmail and Slack are common starting points) and pick a template from the Relay template library. Templates cover common use cases like email summarisation, lead notification, and meeting follow-up, and are a faster way to get a first working workflow than building from scratch.

The key thing to figure out early is where human steps belong in your workflows — what decisions do you actually want a person to make, and what can safely run automatically? Relay’s interface makes it easy to add and remove human steps as you refine, so a good approach is to start with human review on every step and remove the checkpoints as you build confidence in the automation.