Substack Posts Scraper — full articles as Markdown & plain text

Turn any Substack publication into a clean dataset: every post with title, subtitle, date, authors, paywall status, likes, comments, restacks, tags, cover image, podcast/video info and — optionally — the full article body as Markdown and plain text. Works with name.substack.com and with custom domains (e.g. www.lennysnewsletter.com). Uses Substack's public JSON endpoints: no login, no proxies, no browser.

Typical uses: newsletter monitoring and research, competitive analysis of writers, content archives, LLM/RAG corpora, sentiment/engagement tracking, Make/Zapier/Sheets automations.

What you get

One row per post (type: "post"):

field	description
publication, publication_url	Substack handle and site
post_id, slug, url	Stable ID, slug and canonical URL
title, subtitle, description	Headline, dek and SEO description
date	ISO 8601 publish time
authors, author_handles	Bylines
post_type	newsletter, podcast, thread, video…
audience, is_paywalled	everyone, only_paid, founding
wordcount, reaction_count, comment_count, restacks	Length and engagement
tags, section	Post tags and section
cover_image, podcast_url, podcast_duration, video_upload_id	Media
preview	Short teaser text
body_markdown, body_text, body_words, body_complete	With Include full article body (default on). body_complete is false when only the free preview of a paywalled post was available. body_html optional.

With Include publication info (default on) you get one type: "publication" row: name, author_name, hero_text, description, subdomain, custom_domain, logo_url, cover_photo_url, language, created_at, copyright, twitter, paid_subscriptions, monthly_price_cents, currency, pinned_post_ids.

Unknown or unreachable publications produce a type: "error" row (free) and the run continues.

Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or push rows to Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, webhooks or your code via the Apify API.

Input

field	default	meaning
publications	—	Handles or URLs: astralcodexten, lenny.substack.com, https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
maxPosts	50	Per publication, newest first
since	—	Only posts on/after YYYY-MM-DD
includeBody	true	Fetch each post's full body (Markdown + text)
includeHtml	false	Also keep the original HTML
freeOnly	false	Skip paywalled posts
includePublicationInfo	true	Add the publication row

Example:

{
  "publications": ["astralcodexten", "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com"],
  "maxPosts": 100,
  "since": "2026-01-01",
  "includeBody": true
}

Schedule the actor and deduplicate on post_id to keep an always-current archive.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0008 per stored row ($0.80 per 1,000 posts). Each post row and each publication-info row counts as one event. Only rows actually written to the dataset are charged; error rows and filtered-out posts are free. Apify platform usage (roughly 1 second of compute per post with bodies) is billed separately by Apify.

Limitations — please read

• Paywalled posts: Substack only exposes the free preview of paid posts; body_complete: false marks them and body_words vs wordcount shows how much you got. Subscriber-only content is not accessible.
• Comments and subscriber counts are not included (Substack does not expose them publicly per publication).
• Markdown conversion covers headings, paragraphs, bold/italic, links, images, lists, quotes, code and tables; embedded widgets (subscribe buttons, polls, embedded posts) are removed.
• Runs at about 2 requests per second per publication to stay polite; 1,000 posts with bodies take roughly 8–10 minutes.

Not affiliated with Substack. Uses only publicly accessible endpoints.