You should own your automations.
When an automation company closes, what you own is what you keep.
By Harvey Kubath, Agentic Builds · 23 September 2026
THE ONE-MINUTE VERSION
- Relay.app told its customers on 17 July 2026 that it was closing. Paying customers lost access on 14 September.
- Their workflows could be exported, but only as a file to rebuild from. No other platform can import it.
- Whatever we build runs in your own accounts, on tools you can look up, and you get the logins.
On 17 July 2026, the automation company Relay.app told its customers it was closing. Free accounts stopped working on 15 August. Paying customers lost access on 14 September.
Nothing about it was a scandal. Relay was well regarded, and its founder went on to lead product for Google Chrome. It was a company deciding to stop, which companies do.
For the people using it, the question was simpler: what do we actually have? The answer was an export. Workflows could be downloaded as a file, but no other automation platform can import that file. It's a set of notes to rebuild from, not something that runs.
Renting and owning
Most automation is rented. It lives inside someone else's product, runs on their servers, and stops when they do. For small things, that's fine. For the job that answers your customers or sends your invoices, it's a risk worth knowing about.
What owning looks like
When we build something, it runs in accounts that belong to you. At handover you get the logins and the documentation. It's built on tools that are widely used and easy to look up, so if you ever want somebody else to look after it, they'll already know how it works.
That's why our site names every tool we use. None of them is ours. Nothing we build depends on us staying in business.
Three questions to ask whoever builds yours
- Whose account does this run in?
- If you disappeared tomorrow, what would keep working?
- Could someone else pick this up without starting again?
If the answers are "ours", "nothing" and "no", you're renting.