It’s been a rough few weeks for the tools a lot of us built our businesses on.
Airtable was acquired by Bending Spoons in an all-cash deal worth $1.285 billion. And separately, Relay.app announced it’s shutting down entirely. Free accounts lose access August 15, paying customers get until September 14, and after that, workspaces, workflows, and stored credentials are permanently deleted.
Now these are two different situations with very different timelines. But if you’re running client work, ops, or automations through either one, they add up to the same question:
Wait…is my data okay?
These aren’t the same kind of problem
Airtable isn’t going anywhere tomorrow. It’s changing hands. Bending Spoons’ pattern with past acquisitions (Evernote, WeTransfer, AOL) has been acquire, restructure, hold – not shut down. So this is a “know your exit exists” situation, not a “move tonight” one.
Relay.app has a hard deadline. This one isn’t a maybe. If you have live workflows on Relay, you’re on a clock that ends for good on September 14 at the latest, and sooner if you’re on a free plan. Stored credentials and app tokens get deleted with the account. This is the one where waiting actually costs you something.
These different problems come with the same underlying lesson: the tools running your business aren’t guaranteed to still be there in the shape you built them. And the tech landscape is becoming more and more volatile as Big AI grows.
What I’d actually do about each one
For Airtable: Don’t panic-migrate. First, do get a real audit of your bases. Look through every table, automation, and integration, including the ones a past version of you (or a past contractor) set up and never documented. Know what leaving would take before you’re forced to find out under pressure.
For Relay.app: Move now. Export your workspace data today (Relay’s own docs note the export isn’t always cleanly importable elsewhere, so plan for a rebuild, not a drag-and-drop). Then get your workflows rebuilt in a tool that isn’t sunsetting and appears to be stable. For most of my clients, that’s Zapier, where I’m a Silver Solutions Provider, though the right home depends on what your workflows actually do. A few of my clients have chosen Make.com, whose beta AI Copilot is more along the lines of the AI Copilot we loved in Relay.
What this looks like when I’m involved
This is the work I’ve been doing with clients this week, whichever platform they’re leaving:
Audit what’s actually running. Not just what you remember building. The automations, integrations, and connections that quietly do their job until the day they don’t.
Export everything. Export all your data, runs, JSON files, and screenshot all the steps.
Map it to the right destination. For Airtable, that might be Zite, ClickUp, or SmartSuite. For Relay, it’s usually Zapier or Make. The right answer depends on what you need the system to do, and definitely not which tool has the loudest migration marketing this week.
Rebuild so nothing breaks mid-move. Most migration failures aren’t dramatic. They’re quiet, like a follow-up sequence that just stops firing, and nobody notices for three weeks.
Hand you a system you actually understand. Not one you’re renting blind faith in. The goal isn’t just “off the old platform.” It’s knowing what’s happening in your systems and why, regardless of what any single vendor decides next. Every migration comes with a close look at what exactly is going on, if it needs to be rebuilt, and what that rebuilding should include.
This isn’t really about Airtable or Relay
Here’s the bigger thing worth sitting with, news cycle aside: “I have no idea what’s actually happening to my data” is not a place your business should live. Ever. Regardless of who owns the platform underneath you, or how generous their wind-down window is.
If this week put a knot in your stomach, that knot is telling you something true. You’ve outgrown “I’ll figure it out if something breaks.”
If you want a second set of eyes
You don’t have to decide anything today, unless you’re on Relay (in which case, today is genuinely the day to start). Either way, if you want someone to look at your current setup and tell you honestly what your options are, that’s a conversation, not a commitment.
Book a free call and we’ll figure out what actually makes sense for your business.
