Substack Scraper — extract posts, articles & newsletter data

Substack Scraper lets you extract posts and articles from any Substack newsletter in seconds. Give it one or more publication URLs and get structured data: titles, full article text, authors, publish dates, likes, comment counts, cover images, and paywall status — ready to export as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or feed straight into an AI/LLM pipeline.

What can Substack Scraper do?

• ✅ Scrape all posts from any Substack publication (newest, top, or community-picked)
• ✅ Extract full article text (clean plain text + original HTML) — perfect for RAG, LLM training data, and content analysis
• ✅ Get engagement data: likes and comment counts for every post
• ✅ Detect paywalled vs. free posts, with an option to skip subscriber-only content
• ✅ Collect author names and handles for every post
• ✅ Scrape multiple newsletters in a single run

Why scrape Substack?

Substack hosts hundreds of thousands of newsletters covering tech, finance, politics, and culture. Use this scraper for competitor and trend monitoring, building AI knowledge bases from newsletter archives, content research and curation, tracking writer engagement over time, or archiving publications you follow.

Input

Field	Description
publicationUrls	One or more Substack homepages, e.g. https://example.substack.com (custom domains work too)
maxPostsPerPublication	Cap the number of posts per newsletter (default 50)
includeFullText	Fetch complete article body for every post (default on)
sortBy	new, top, or community
onlyFreePosts	Skip paywalled posts

Output example

{
  "title": "How I built a $1M side project",
  "url": "https://example.substack.com/p/how-i-built-it",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-21T14:02:11.000Z",
  "isPaywalled": false,
  "likes": 412,
  "comments": 87,
  "wordCount": 2350,
  "authors": [{ "name": "Jane Doe", "handle": "janedoe" }],
  "bodyText": "Full article text here..."
}

How much does it cost?

You pay a small fee per post scraped (pay-per-result). A typical 50-post newsletter archive costs just a few cents. There are no subscriptions — you only pay for what you extract.

Using the results

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML from the Apify Console, connect via API, or integrate with Zapier, Make, LangChain, and LlamaIndex. Schedule the Actor to monitor newsletters daily or weekly.

Is it legal to scrape Substack?

This Actor only collects publicly available data — posts anyone can open in a browser. It does not bypass paywalls or collect private data. Always review the terms of service of the websites you scrape and consult a lawyer if unsure about your specific use case.

FAQ

Does it work with custom domains? Yes — any Substack-powered publication works, e.g. newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com.

Can it bypass paywalls? No. Paywalled posts return metadata only (title, date, likes), never subscriber-only content.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes, use Apify's built-in scheduler to monitor publications and get only fresh posts.