Substack Scraper | Posts, Full Text & Comments | $0.99/1K

Scrape any public Substack newsletter into clean, structured data: post metadata, full article text (HTML and plain text), authors, tags, engagement counts and comments with replies. No login, no cookies and no browser needed, so runs are fast, cheap and reliable.

$0.99 per 1,000 results at most, full content included, and cheaper on paid Apify plans. No surcharge for content or comments, and only a negligible $0.00005 per-run start charge applied by Apify.

What you can do with it

• Sponsor and partnership research — find newsletters in your niche, see how often they publish, how many likes, restacks and comments each post earns, and who writes them.
• Content and competitor analysis — export a publication's whole archive, track topics and tags over time, compare engagement between newsletters.
• LLM and RAG datasets — get clean plain text plus original HTML for thousands of articles, ready for fine-tuning, embeddings or summarisation.
• Audience research — read what readers say in comments, who replies to whom, and which posts spark discussion.
• Monitoring — run on a schedule with incremental mode and receive only posts you have not seen yet.
• Keyword discovery — search all of Substack for a topic and scrape every matching post.

Features

• Full archive of one or many publications (name.substack.com or custom domains such as www.lennysnewsletter.com)
• A single post URL works too (https://example.substack.com/p/some-post)
• Full content as HTML and plain text
• Comments with nested replies, author flag and likes (optional)
• Date range filter (startDate / endDate)
• Free-only filter (onlyFree)
• Incremental mode — return only new posts since the last run
• Keyword search across Substack (searchQueries)
• Built-in retries and rate-limit handling, so long runs finish cleanly

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.99 / 1,000 results ($0.00099 per post) on the standard price. Paid Apify plans get lower per-result prices automatically. Each post written to the dataset is one result.

What you get per result	Included
Metadata (title, date, audience, counts, tags, authors, cover image)	Yes
Full content (HTML + plain text)	Yes
Comments tree	Yes
Per-run start charge (set by Apify)	$0.00005

Results	Cost at the standard price
100	$0.099
1,000	$0.99
10,000	$9.90
100,000	$99.00

Use maxItems to cap spend. Apify's free plan credits cover your first runs.

Input

Field	Type	Description
publications	string[]	Subdomain (lenny), URL (https://lenny.substack.com) or custom domain. A /p/slug URL scrapes one post.
searchQueries	string[]	Optional keywords to search all of Substack.
maxPostsPerPublication	integer	Max posts per publication and per search query. Default 100.
maxItems	integer	Total result cap for the run. Default 100.
includeContent	boolean	Fetch full HTML and plain text. Default true.
includeComments	boolean	Fetch comments and replies. Default false.
maxCommentsPerPost	integer	Comments kept per post (0 = unlimited). Default 100.
startDate / endDate	string	Only posts published within this range (YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive).
onlyFree	boolean	Skip paid posts. Default false.
incremental	boolean	Only return posts not returned by earlier incremental runs. Default false.
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional. Usually not needed.

Example input

{
    "publications": ["https://www.lennysnewsletter.com", "astralcodexten"],
    "searchQueries": ["product management"],
    "maxPostsPerPublication": 50,
    "maxItems": 100,
    "includeContent": true,
    "includeComments": true,
    "maxCommentsPerPost": 50,
    "startDate": "2026-01-01",
    "onlyFree": true,
    "incremental": false
}

Output

Each dataset item is one post:

{
    "postId": 208730073,
    "slug": "announcing-lennys-jobs-the-best-place",
    "publication": "Lenny's Newsletter",
    "publicationUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "title": "Announcing Lenny’s Jobs: The best place in the world to find, vet, and land your dream job",
    "subtitle": "Where product managers, engineers, designers, and growth/marketing professionals discover high-quality open roles at tech companies",
    "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/announcing-lennys-jobs-the-best-place",
    "publishedAt": "2026-08-18T15:40:06.921Z",
    "postType": "newsletter",
    "audience": "everyone",
    "isPaywalled": false,
    "wordcount": 933,
    "likes": 382,
    "restacks": 9,
    "commentCount": 18,
    "tags": ["Career"],
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Lenny Rachitsky",
            "handle": "lenny",
            "bio": "Writing • Angel investing • Advising",
            "photoUrl": "https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/afba5161-65bb-4d99-8d6b-cce660917fa1_1540x1540.png",
            "url": "https://substack.com/@lenny"
        }
    ],
    "coverImage": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/…",
    "contentHtml": "<p><em><span>👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. …</span></em></p>",
    "contentText": "👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I share deeply researched product, growth, …",
    "comments": [
        {
            "id": 317389445,
            "body": "The Lenny 100 list is GENIUS 👏",
            "author": "Tom Orbach",
            "handle": "marketingideas",
            "date": "2026-08-18T15:48:15.832Z",
            "likes": 7,
            "isAuthor": false,
            "children": []
        }
    ]
}

comments is present only when includeComments is on. Items from keyword search also carry searchQuery. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or use the API.

Paid (paywalled) posts

Substack only exposes the public preview of subscriber-only posts to anonymous readers, and so does this Actor. Paid posts are returned with audience: "only_paid", isPaywalled: true and the preview text that appears before the paywall; wordcount still reflects the full article length. Comments on paid posts are hidden by Substack from non-subscribers, so they usually come back empty. Use onlyFree to skip paid posts entirely. The Actor does not log in or bypass paywalls.

Incremental mode

Turn on incremental and schedule the Actor. The Actor remembers which posts it has already returned for each publication or search keyword and returns only new ones. Repeat runs are fast and cheap.

Tips

• Start with a small maxItems to preview the output, then raise it.
• Metadata-only runs (includeContent: false) are the fastest, and the price per result is the same.
• To scrape a whole archive, set both maxPostsPerPublication and maxItems high.

FAQ

Do I need a Substack account or cookies? No. Only publicly available data is collected.

Does it work with custom domains? Yes. Pass the domain (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com) or the name.substack.com address; both work.

Why is the text of some posts short? Those are paid posts. Anonymous access returns only the preview that Substack shows before the paywall.

Why did I get fewer results than maxItems? The publication has fewer posts than the limits, or your date range, onlyFree or incremental filters excluded the rest.

What happens if Substack rate-limits me? The Actor slows down and retries automatically, so your run keeps going without any setup.

How does the search work? searchQueries searches Substack for matching posts. Each match is returned with the same fields as any other post. For keyword search inside a single publication, scrape its archive and filter on title or contentText.

Is scraping Substack legal? The Actor only reads publicly available data. You are responsible for using it in line with Substack's terms, applicable law and privacy regulations such as GDPR, especially when handling commenters' names and handles.

Something is broken or missing. Who do I ask? Open an issue in the Actor's Issues tab and include your run URL.