Substack Scraper

Extract posts, full article text, likes, restacks, comments and podcast episodes from any Substack newsletter, including publications on custom domains. No login, no API key.

Give it newsletter URLs (or just the subdomain) and get a structured dataset of the newest posts with author, date, audience (free or paid), engagement numbers and the readable article body as plain text and HTML. Optionally scrape the full comment thread of every post.

What can you do with it?

• Research and competitive analysis: what the leading newsletters in your niche publish, how often, and what gets the most likes and comments.
• Content monitoring: schedule the Actor and get every new post from the newsletters you follow in Slack, Notion or your inbox, before it hits your crowded mailbox.
• AI and RAG pipelines: feed clean article text into a vector database or an agent. Works with the Apify MCP server.
• Audience and engagement analytics for your own publication: likes, restacks, comment counts and word counts per post over time.
• Podcast indexing: episode titles, audio URLs and durations of Substack podcasts.
• Comment mining: who comments, how often, and what readers ask for.

Features

• Accepts name, name.substack.com, https://custom-domain.com or a single post URL (/p/slug).
• Newest posts first with automatic pagination; stop by count (maxPostsPerPublication) or by date (postedAfter).
• Substack-side keyword search (search) so you only pay for matching posts.
• Full article body as bodyText and bodyHtml (free posts). Paywalled posts return the public preview and are flagged with bodyIsPreviewOnly: true.
• Engagement: likes, comment count, restacks, word count, audience (everyone, only_paid, founding).
• Optional comments as separate records with threading (parentCommentId, depth), author handle, date and likes.
• Publication metadata on every record (name, description, URL).
• Unreachable or non-Substack sites produce an error record instead of failing the run.
• No browser, no proxy needed: fast and inexpensive.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
publications	array	required	Newsletter URLs, subdomains or single post URLs.
maxPostsPerPublication	integer	50	Newest posts first.
search	string	–	Keyword filter applied by Substack's archive search.
postedAfter	string	–	ISO date. Pagination stops at older posts.
includeBody	boolean	true	Fetch each post for bodyText / bodyHtml.
includeComments	boolean	false	Also output comment records for every post.
proxyConfiguration	object	none	Optional Apify Proxy settings.

Example:

{
    "publications": ["https://www.lennysnewsletter.com", "stratechery"],
    "maxPostsPerPublication": 100,
    "postedAfter": "2026-01-01",
    "includeBody": true,
    "includeComments": true
}

Output

Post record:

{
    "type": "post",
    "publication": "www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "publicationUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "publicationName": "Lenny's Newsletter",
    "postId": 219482066,
    "slug": "how-to-tell-if-a-startup-has-a-moat",
    "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-tell-if-a-startup-has-a-moat",
    "title": "How to tell if a startup has a moat",
    "subtitle": "A practical framework...",
    "postType": "newsletter",
    "postDate": "2026-10-13T11:00:00.000Z",
    "audience": "only_paid",
    "isPaywalled": true,
    "authors": ["Dan Hockenmaier"],
    "authorHandles": ["danhock"],
    "likes": 219,
    "comments": 12,
    "restacks": 2,
    "wordCount": 4153,
    "coverImage": "https://substackcdn.com/image/...",
    "podcastUrl": null,
    "bodyText": "Most founders think they have a moat...",
    "bodyHtml": "<p>Most founders think...</p>",
    "bodyWordCount": 1980,
    "bodyIsPreviewOnly": true
}

Comment record:

{
    "type": "comment",
    "publication": "www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "postId": 219482066,
    "postUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-tell-if-a-startup-has-a-moat",
    "commentId": 1234567,
    "parentCommentId": null,
    "depth": 0,
    "date": "2026-09-29T23:34:47.245Z",
    "name": "Product Mindset",
    "handle": "productmindset",
    "body": "Thank you for putting this together...",
    "likes": 4
}

Pricing

You pay per post and, if enabled, per comment. No platform usage fees are added. A typical newsletter archive of 300 posts with full text finishes in about a minute.

Tips

• Weekly digest: schedule the Actor with postedAfter and send the results through an Apify integration (email, Slack, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n).
• Only free content: filter the dataset on audience = "everyone" or bodyIsPreviewOnly = false.
• Custom domains: just paste the domain; the Actor follows Substack's redirects automatically.

Limitations

• Paywalled posts are returned with the preview Substack shows to non-subscribers; the Actor never bypasses paywalls.
• Notes (the social feed) are not included.

Legal and fair use

The Actor reads pages and endpoints Substack serves publicly. Respect authors' copyright and the privacy of commenters when you store or republish data.

Support

Open an issue on the Issues tab for broken publications, extra fields or bulk needs. Issues are usually answered within a day.

You can also email support@agentsgearbox.com. More actors, daily-updated comparisons of scrapers for 200+ websites and custom scraper requests at agentsgearbox.com.