Relay

Relay is an anonymous team feedback platform for organisations that want to know what their people actually think, rather than the version that survives a manager being in the room. It replaces the annual engagement survey with a continuous flow of candid check-ins, and it's built around one design decision. The link between the person who answers and the answer itself is severed, so a response can't be traced, judged, or used against anyone.

The problem it's going after is the gap between what leaders hear and what's really going on. Good people leave, and looking back the warning signs were there for months, but nobody felt safe enough to say them out loud. The founding team, most of them from Australia, say that's the pattern they kept watching while building teams, running agencies and starting companies, and it's why the product exists. An annual survey arrives too late and too filtered to catch it.

Relay collects responses through several channels, web, mobile and email, and pulls everything into one dashboard. It reads the incoming feedback for tone, trends and recurring themes, then delivers a summary every Monday morning with prioritised actions, so a leader starts the week with a short list of things to do rather than a pile of raw comments to wade through. Response collection is unlimited on every plan. Pro plans add business health scoring and global benchmarking, which puts your numbers beside other organisations instead of leaving you to guess whether a score is healthy.

It's aimed at leadership teams, people operations and agency owners who want a steady read on morale and are prepared to act on it weekly. The site names BBDO as a customer, and the figures it quotes include a 66 percent reduction in churn, a 20 percent lift in profit and 68 percent response rates. Those are the vendor's own numbers, and the sensible way to read them is as what a well-run rollout can look like, not a guarantee for every team.

What sets it apart from survey tools is the cadence and the anonymity model. Instead of one heavy instrument a year, it runs a lightweight loop all the time, and the anonymity is structural rather than a promise, because the platform simply doesn't keep the connection between sender and response. That's what makes the feedback blunt. Relay's own phrase for the result is brutally candid and infinitely actionable, and the Monday summary is where the actionable half is meant to happen. There's a 2026 whitepaper, product documentation and a knowledge base on the site if you want to read the method before signing up.

The people behind it are a small leadership group, Dave Keating as CEO, Danny Bos as CTO, Laurie Grattan leading design and Rob Milliken leading engineering. The site's method section explains how they think about fixing the problem, the anonymity section documents how the sender link is severed, and the resources include a blog, a knowledge base of how-tos and product documentation, so there's a fair amount to read before you commit a team to it.

The trade-offs are the usual ones for anonymous feedback. You can't follow up with an individual, so the themes and the weekly actions are what you work with. The site doesn't spell out a minimum group size, so a small team should ask how anonymity holds up when only a handful of people respond in a given week. Relay also positions itself for enterprise organisations and creative agencies, so a five-person startup may find more machinery than it needs.

Compared with the alternatives, a suggestion box nobody trusts, a big annual survey, or relying on one-to-ones where people say what's safe, the pitch is continuity with safety. Plans are metered on members, outbound messages and admin seats rather than on responses, so nobody is discouraged from answering. Getting started means signing up on the Free plan, adding members and letting the first check-ins run, and the documentation covers the setup from there. The contact page offers demos and onboarding support from the sales and support teams for anyone who wants a walkthrough first.

Access is freemium. The Free plan costs nothing, needs no credit card and covers up to 100 members with unlimited responses, 400 outbound messages and one admin user. Pro is $99 a month for up to 1,000 members, 4,000 outbound messages, ten admins, team management and detailed analytics. Enterprise is custom priced and adds unlimited members, 25,000 outbound messages, twenty admins, SSO, audit logs, enhanced security and a dedicated data analyst. Because the outbound message allowance is what scales between plans, it's worth estimating how often you'll prompt people before choosing a tier. There are no setup fees, and support is reachable at support@openrelay.app.