Substack Scraper: posts, engagement and category leaderboards

Two jobs in one actor:

1. Posts from any Substack: give newsletter URLs or subdomains (custom domains work) and get every post with likes, comments, restacks, word count, free/paid, authors, tags, section, preview text and cover image. Filter by date and free/paid.
2. Category leaderboards: pick Substack categories (Technology, Finance, Crypto, Politics… 32 in total) and get the ranked top newsletters with subscriber tier (e.g. "1.1M+"), paid-subscriber band ("Tens of thousands of paid subscribers"), bestseller tier, author, language, launch date and URL. Optionally pull each one's latest N posts.

Public JSON only: no login, no cookies, no proxies, and runs finish in 2–3 s for 35–60 rows.

Use cases

Newsletter sponsorship and partnership prospecting, creator and competitor tracking, content research (what topics get the most likes and comments), media monitoring, and building datasets of top newsletters per niche.

Input

Field	Description
publications	URLs or subdomains, e.g. https://blog.bytebytego.com, pragmaticengineer
maxPostsPerPublication	Default 50
postedAfter	YYYY-MM-DD
audience	all / free / paid
categories	Leaderboards to pull (select list)
maxPublicationsPerCategory	Default 50
postsFromCategoryPublications	Latest N posts per leaderboard newsletter (0 = none)
maxResults	Hard cap across the whole run

Output (real rows from test runs on Oct 31, 2026)

Post:

{
  "record_type": "post",
  "publication_url": "https://blog.bytebytego.com",
  "publication_name": "ByteByteGo Newsletter",
  "post_id": 222752055,
  "title": "EP231: AI Terms You Need to Know",
  "subtitle": "What else should be on the list?",
  "url": "https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/ep231-ai-terms-you-need-to-know",
  "post_date": "2026-10-31T15:31:08.160Z",
  "type": "newsletter",
  "audience": "free",
  "authors": [
    "ByteByteGo"
  ],
  "likes": 185,
  "comments": 3,
  "restacks": 4,
  "wordcount": 1084,
  "section": null,
  "tags": [],
  "podcast_duration_sec": null,
  "preview_text": "The all-in-one intelligent cloud (Sponsored)",
  "scraped_at": "2026-11-01T06:02:24.783437+00:00"
}

Publication:

{
  "record_type": "publication",
  "category": "Top in Technology",
  "category_rank": 2,
  "publication_name": "The Pragmatic Engineer",
  "url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "subdomain": "pragmaticengineer",
  "author_name": "Gergely Orosz",
  "description": "Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Highly relevant for software engineers, AI engineers and engineering leaders, useful for those working in tech.",
  "language": "en",
  "subscribers_tier": "1.1M+",
  "subscribers_min": 1000000,
  "ranking_detail": "Tens of thousands of paid subscribers",
  "bestseller_tier": 10000,
  "paid_enabled": true,
  "first_post_date": "2021-08-30T11:24:02.082Z",
  "scraped_at": "2026-11-01T06:02:42.372648+00:00"
}

Pricing (suggested)

Pay per event: post at $0.001 ($1.00/1K) and publication at $0.003 ($3.00/1K) (leaderboard rows are richer and rarer). No start fee. Benchmarks in Apify Store on Oct 31, 2026: the leading Substack actor charges about $1.15/1K posts plus $5/1K run starts (175 monthly users, no reviews yet), others charge $15/1K entities, and one is rated 2.6★. Matching on post price and leading on leaderboards and engagement fields is the angle.

Notes

Only publicly listed metadata and preview text are collected. Full paywalled content is never accessed.