Substack Newsletter Scraper

Scrape Substack newsletters and extract structured post data including titles, full text, subscriber estimates, engagement metrics, and publication metadata for newsletter intelligence and content analysis.

Overview

This actor scrapes Substack publications using the Substack API when available, falling back to web crawling for custom domain newsletters. It extracts comprehensive post data including full article text, engagement metrics like likes and comments, and publication metadata.

Features

• Scrape posts from any Substack publication URL (including custom domains)
• Use Substack API for fast and reliable data extraction
• Fall back to web crawling when API is unavailable
• Extract full post text with HTML stripped
• Capture engagement metrics (likes, comment counts)
• Identify paid vs free content
• Calculate word counts for content analysis
• Works with empty input using sensible defaults

Input Configuration

Field	Type	Description	Default
publicationUrls	Array	Substack publication URLs to scrape	["https://platformer.news", "https://stratechery.com"]
maxPosts	Integer	Maximum posts to scrape per publication	50

You can use both Substack subdomain URLs (e.g., https://newsletter.substack.com) and custom domain URLs (e.g., https://platformer.news).

Output Data

Each scraped post includes the following fields:

• postTitle - Post headline
• author - Author name
• publicationName - Newsletter publication name
• publishedDate - ISO 8601 publication date
• fullText - Full post text (up to 10,000 characters)
• subscriberCountEstimate - Estimated subscriber count if available
• likes - Number of likes/reactions
• commentsCount - Number of comments
• url - Original post URL
• subtitle - Post subtitle
• wordCount - Total word count
• isPaid - Whether the post is paywalled
• scrapedAt - Timestamp of data extraction

Use Cases

This scraper is ideal for newsletter monitoring, competitive intelligence for newsletter creators, content research, media analysis, and audience engagement benchmarking. Content creators, marketers, and researchers use this tool to analyze newsletter trends and performance.

API Integration

You can call this actor via the Apify API to integrate Substack data into your content analytics dashboards, research databases, or media monitoring systems. Results are available in JSON, CSV, XML, and other formats.

Cost Estimation

With pay-per-event pricing at $0.75 per 1,000 results, scraping 50 Substack posts costs approximately $0.0375. The actor is highly efficient, using direct API calls when possible and lightweight Cheerio crawling as fallback.