Substack Category Publications Scraper

Get a Substack category's leaderboard: the top publications ranked by Substack, each with its full details (subscriber badge, paid band, prices, author) and rank.

Features

• Real-time Substack data — results are fetched live at run time, never cached or stale
• No login, cookies, or proxy configuration needed — just provide the input and run
• Each result is pushed as a separate dataset item, exportable as JSON, CSV, or Excel
• Fast: a typical run finishes in seconds

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
category	string	yes	Category ID or slug, e.g. 4 or technology (bestsellers and podcasts for the site-wide boards).
tier	string	no	all, paid or rising (bestsellers: rising; podcasts: all or paid) One of: all, paid, rising.
page	integer	no	Page number (default: 1), 25 publications per page. Up to 21 pages; rising 10; bestsellers and podcasts 4

Pricing

This Actor is billed per run — a flat $0.003 per run.

• One run returns all matching results for your input, and costs $0.003 — whether it comes back with one result or hundreds.
• You’re only charged when a run succeeds, or when it fails because what you asked for was looked up and doesn’t exist, is private, or isn’t valid: that costs one run ($0.003). Other failed runs are free.

Example output

{
  "publication_id": "817132",
  "name": "ByteByteGo Newsletter",
  "subdomain": "bytebytego",
  "url": "https://blog.bytebytego.com",
  "custom_domain": "blog.bytebytego.com",
  "description": "Explain complex systems with simple terms, from the authors of the best-selling system design book series. Join over 1,000,000 friendly readers.",
  "logo_url": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eXV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazona\u2026",
  "cover_image_url": "https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a4e1c1bd-03ee-4126-b3e4-19553b2d2fc6_1279x821.png",
  "author": "bytebytego",
  "author_name": "Alex Xu",
  "author_id": "22329494",
  "author_url": "https://substack.com/@bytebytego",
  "subscriber_count": null,
  "subscriber_count_label": "",
  "ranking_detail": "",
  "paid_subscriber_band": "",
  "paid_subscriber_floor": 0,
  "bestseller_tier": 0,
  "is_bestseller": false,
  "paid_enabled": true,
  "plans": [
    {
      "interval": "month",
      "amount": 15.0,
      "currency": "USD"
    }
  ],
  "has_podcast": false,
  "podcast": null,
  "sections": [],
  "author_pic_url": "",
  "logo_url_wide": "",
  "founding_plan_name": "",
  "has_recommendations": false,
  "has_chat": false,
  "language": "en",
  "type": "newsletter",
  "twitter_handle": "alexxubyte",
  "created_at": "2022-03-27 03:36:45",
  "first_post_date": "2021-11-25 17:31:00",
  "source": "Substack",
  "domain": "substack.com",
  "rank": 1
}

About

Maintained by Data Direct — a small suite of fast, reliable Substack and web-data scrapers. Each actor returns clean, structured results with no login, cookies, or proxy setup required. Have a question or a custom data need? Open an issue on this actor.