Substack Scraper: Posts, Likes and Comments, Plus Top Newsletters by Category

Scrape any Substack newsletter's posts with likes, comments, restacks, word count and free/paid flag, and pull the ranked top newsletters in 32 Substack categories with subscriber tier, paid-subscriber band, author and launch date. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or call it from the API. No login, no cookies, no proxies, from $1 per 1,000 posts with no start fee.

Built and maintained by Clean Data Labs.

Ready-made examples (one click to run)

Example	What it returns
Top Substack Technology newsletters with subscriber tiers	Ranked Technology leaderboard with subscriber tiers
Top Substack Finance newsletters for sponsorship outreach	Finance leaderboard, a ready sponsorship list
Top Substack Crypto newsletters	Crypto leaderboard
Substack posts with likes and comments from tech newsletters	Latest posts with engagement from three tech newsletters
Recent free posts from top Substack Business newsletters	Top Business newsletters plus their latest free posts

Who it's for

• Marketers and agencies prospecting newsletters for sponsorships, partnerships and guest posts.
• Creators and media teams tracking competitors and benchmarking engagement.
• Content strategists and researchers studying which topics earn the most likes and comments.
• Data teams building datasets of top newsletters per niche.

Popular use cases

• Pull the top newsletters in Technology, Finance, Crypto, Politics and other categories, ranked, with subscriber tiers.
• Export every recent post from a list of newsletters with engagement metrics for analysis.
• Monitor competitors' posting cadence, free vs. paid mix and audience response.
• Build a sponsorship target list with author names, descriptions and paid-subscriber bands.

Features

• Two modes in one actor: posts from newsletters you choose, and ranked category leaderboards.
• Engagement metrics: likes, comments, restacks and word count on every post.
• Leaderboards for 32 Substack categories, with rank, subscriber tier (e.g. "1.1M+"), paid-subscriber band, bestseller tier, author, language and launch date.
• Flexible publication input: full URLs or bare subdomains (e.g. pragmaticengineer).
• Filters: posted-after date and free/paid audience.
• Chain both modes: optionally pull the latest N posts from every newsletter found on a leaderboard.
• Public data only: no login, cookies or proxies. Paywalled post content is never accessed.

Input example

{
  "publications": ["https://blog.bytebytego.com", "pragmaticengineer", "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/"],
  "maxPostsPerPublication": 15,
  "postedAfter": "2026-09-01",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Input	What it does
publications	Newsletter URLs or subdomains to fetch posts from
maxPostsPerPublication	Latest posts per publication (default 50)
postedAfter	Only posts on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
audience	all, free or paid posts
categories	Substack category leaderboards to pull
maxPublicationsPerCategory	Top newsletters per category (default 50)
postsFromCategoryPublications	Also fetch the latest N posts from each leaderboard newsletter (0 = none)
maxResults	Hard cap on rows across the run; you are charged per row (default 500)

Output fields

Post rows (record_type: "post")

Field	Description
publication_name / publication_url	Newsletter name and URL
post_id / title / subtitle / url	Post identity and link
post_date	Publication time (UTC)
type / audience	Post type (e.g. newsletter, podcast) and free or paid audience
authors / section / tags	Bylines, section and tags
likes / comments / restacks	Engagement metrics
wordcount / podcast_duration_sec	Length of the post or podcast
preview_text / cover_image	Preview text and cover image URL
scraped_at	When the row was collected (UTC)

Newsletter rows (record_type: "publication")

Field	Description
category / category_rank	Leaderboard and position
publication_name / url / subdomain	Newsletter identity
author_name / description / language	Author, tagline and language
subscribers_tier / subscribers_min	Subscriber tier label and its lower bound
ranking_detail	Paid-subscriber band, e.g. "Tens of thousands of paid subscribers"
bestseller_tier / paid_enabled	Bestseller tier and whether paid subscriptions are on
first_post_date / logo_url	Launch date and logo
scraped_at	When the row was collected (UTC)

Sample output

Real rows from test runs on October 31, 2026 (image URLs omitted for display).

{
  "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"
}

{
  "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

Pay per result: you pay only for rows saved to your dataset, with no start fee.

Result	Price	Per 1,000
Post (with engagement metrics)	$0.001	$1.00
Newsletter (leaderboard row)	$0.003	$3.00

Free credit

Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage credit every month, no credit card required. That covers up to about 5,000 posts or about 1,600 leaderboard newsletters a month. Use maxResults to cap any single run.

FAQ and troubleshooting

A publication returned no posts.

Check the URL or subdomain, and try a full URL such as https://www.lennysnewsletter.com. Also check that postedAfter and audience are not filtering everything out.

Can I get the full text of paid posts?

No. Only publicly listed metadata and preview text are collected; paywalled content is never accessed.

Why are subscriber counts shown as tiers?

Substack publishes subscriber sizes as tiers (for example "1.1M+") rather than exact counts. subscribers_min gives the numeric lower bound.

Can I use this as a Substack API?

Yes. Call it from the Apify API, MCP or integrations and get posts and leaderboards as structured JSON rows, built from the same public data you see on Substack pages.

How do I find newsletters to sponsor or pitch?

Pick a category such as Finance or Technology in categories. Each row has rank, subscriber tier, paid-subscriber band, author and description. See the Finance example.

How do I get posts from a whole category?

Pick categories and set postsFromCategoryPublications to the number of latest posts you want from each newsletter.

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Support

Questions, bugs or feature requests? Email clean-data-labs@mail.grokbot.com or open an issue on the actor's Issues tab.

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