Substack Scraper: Posts, Full Text & Newsletter Subscribers

Scrape any Substack newsletter in seconds, with no Substack account, login, cookies or API key. Give it newsletter addresses, post links, search keywords or a category, and get clean, structured JSON:

• Posts: title, subtitle, link, publish date, type (newsletter, podcast, thread), free or paid
• Full post text as Markdown (ideal for AI, RAG and LLM pipelines), plain text or the original HTML
• Engagement: likes (reactions), comments and restacks, plus word count
• Authors (bylines), tags, section, cover image, podcast audio link and duration
• Newsletter info: subscriber count ("Over 463,000 subscribers"), subscriber and paid-subscriber ranges, bestseller tier, paid plan prices (monthly, yearly, founding), author, language, launch date, logo
• Substack search: find posts across all of Substack by keyword
• Category leaderboards: discover the top (or top paid) newsletters in Technology, Business, Finance, Politics, Crypto, Science and 25+ more categories, with their rank

Works with name.substack.com addresses, bare subdomains (noahpinion), open.substack.com share links and custom domains (www.noahpinion.blog, newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com).

Pricing: $0.40 per 1,000 posts, full text included

	This Actor	Typical Substack scrapers on Apify
Posts (with full text)	$0.40 per 1,000	$1.15 per 1,000 metadata, $2.30 per 1,000 with content; others $1 to $15 per 1,000
Newsletter info rows (subscribers, prices)	$1.00 per 1,000	$2 to $4 per 1,000
Actor start	$0.0005 per GB of memory (512 MB default)	up to $0.09 per run

You pay only for rows you receive. Full text costs nothing extra. Set Max posts per newsletter or Max rows in total to cap a run; your Apify maximum cost per run is always respected.

Use cases

• Newsletter sponsorship and partnership research: rank newsletters in your niche by subscribers and paid plan price before you pitch or buy an ad slot.
• Content and trend monitoring: schedule a daily run on the newsletters you follow and send new posts to Slack, Google Sheets, Notion or a webhook.
• AI, RAG and LLM datasets: clean Markdown of every free post, with links and images kept, ready for embedding or summarization.
• Competitor and market research: see what top writers publish, how often, and which posts get the most likes, comments and restacks.
• Media monitoring and PR: search all of Substack for your brand, product or topic.

Input examples

Latest 20 posts of two newsletters, with full text in Markdown:

{ "newsletters": ["https://www.noahpinion.blog", "bytebytego"], "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 20 }

Top 100 Technology newsletters with subscribers and prices only (no posts):

{ "categories": ["technology"], "maxNewslettersPerCategory": 100, "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 0 }

Search all of Substack for a keyword:

{ "searchQueries": ["ai agents", "creator economy"], "maxPostsPerSearch": 100 }

Everything a newsletter published in the last 7 days, metadata only:

{ "newsletters": ["newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com"], "publishedAfter": "7 days", "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 100, "contentFormat": "none" }

Most popular free posts of all time:

{ "newsletters": ["https://www.noahpinion.blog"], "sort": "top", "audience": "free", "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 50 }

One specific post:

{ "newsletters": ["https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/ep230-rag-vs-agentic-rag"] }

Output

Post row (content shortened):

{
  "type": "post", "postId": 165262142, "title": "A Visual Guide to AI Agents",
  "subtitle": "How AI agents work, key agentic patterns, benefits and challenges.",
  "url": "https://awesomeneuron.substack.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-ai-agents", "slug": "a-visual-guide-to-ai-agents",
  "publishedAt": "2025-06-08T05:30:00.000Z", "postType": "newsletter", "audience": "everyone", "isPaywalled": false,
  "newsletterName": "AwesomeNeuron", "newsletterUrl": "https://awesomeneuron.substack.com",
  "authors": [{ "name": "Rohit Kumar Tiwari", "handle": "analyticalrohit" }],
  "wordcount": 971, "reactionCount": 267, "commentCount": 24, "restackCount": 189,
  "previewText": "Today, I'll explain what AI agents are, using simple explanations and visuals.",
  "coverImage": "https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/....gif", "tags": [],
  "content": "Today, I'll explain what AI agents are...\n\n> A workflow is a set of connected steps...\n\n# **AI Workflows**\n...",
  "contentFormat": "markdown", "contentIsPreview": false, "searchQuery": "ai agents"
}

Newsletter row:

{
  "type": "newsletter", "newsletterId": 35345, "name": "Noahpinion", "url": "https://www.noahpinion.blog",
  "subdomain": "noahpinion", "customDomain": "www.noahpinion.blog", "description": "Economics and other interesting stuff",
  "language": "en", "authorName": "Noah Smith", "authorHandle": "noahpinion",
  "subscribers": 463000, "subscribersText": "Over 463,000 subscribers",
  "subscriberRange": "Hundreds of thousands of subscribers", "paidSubscriberRange": "Tens of thousands of paid subscribers",
  "bestsellerTier": 10000, "paidSubscriptions": true, "currency": "USD", "monthlyPrice": 10, "yearlyPrice": 100, "foundingPrice": 420,
  "hasPodcast": true, "createdAt": "2020-03-28T03:32:51.086Z", "firstPostDate": "2020-11-24T18:26:23.401Z"
}

Leaderboard rows also carry category, leaderboard and rank. Inputs that could not be read (not a Substack site, not found) are listed in the FAILURES record of the run's key-value store, and the rest of the run continues.

The dataset has three views: Posts (overview table), Post content and Newsletters.

How it works and limits

The Actor reads the same public JSON that Substack's own website loads for every visitor (archive, post and search pages), politely and with low concurrency. That means:

• Paid posts return only the public preview Substack shows to non-subscribers (contentIsPreview: true). Subscriber-only content is never bypassed.
• Subscriber counts are the figures Substack publishes on the newsletter page (for example "Over 463,000 subscribers"). Some newsletters hide them; then the field is null.
• Search returns posts only. Substack Notes, comments and reader profiles are not collected, by design.

FAQ

Do I need a Substack account or API key? No. Nothing to set up.

How fast is it? About 50 posts per archive page; 100 posts with full text usually take 10 to 20 seconds.

Does it work with custom domains? Yes. Any Substack-hosted newsletter works, whatever its domain.

Can I get only new posts? Yes. Schedule the Actor with publishedAfter set to your schedule interval (for example "1 day") and connect an integration (Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, webhooks).

Can I use it from AI agents? Yes, through the Apify API, the Apify MCP server, or the Python and JavaScript clients:

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("best_apis/substack-scraper").call(run_input={"newsletters": ["bytebytego"], "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 10})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item.get("title") or item.get("name"))

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/best_apis~substack-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"searchQueries":["ai agents"],"maxPostsPerSearch":20}'

Does it collect personal data? It returns what newsletters publish publicly: posts, bylines and newsletter details. It does not collect emails, subscriber lists, commenters or reader profiles. You are responsible for using the data lawfully (for example GDPR and copyright: posts belong to their authors).

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