Substack Post Comments Scraper

Get the full comment thread of a Substack post, nested. Returns every comment with text, author, date, likes, replies and restacks, replies nested under their parent to any depth, sorted by relevance, newest first or oldest first.

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
url	string	no	Post URL, e.g. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/all-of-the-lenny-and-friends-summit (max 500 characters). Provide url, post_id, or publication and slug.
post_id	string	no	Numeric post ID, as returned in post_id. Provide url, post_id, or publication and slug.
publication	string	no	Publication subdomain, host or URL, used together with slug.
slug	string	no	Post URL slug, e.g. all-of-the-lenny-and-friends-summit, used together with publication.
sort_by	string	no	Sort order for the thread One of: relevance, most_recent, oldest.

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

{
  "comment_id": "13180393",
  "body": "Nothing beats real life examples (especially including failures) in deep detail like this! \ud83d\ude4f",
  "date": "2023-02-28 16:40:12",
  "author": "fullstackresearcher",
  "author_name": "Daniel Kyne",
  "author_id": "8067246",
  "author_url": "https://substack.com/@fullstackresearcher",
  "likes": 49,
  "replies": 1,
  "restacks": 0,
  "is_author": false,
  "is_pinned": false,
  "author_pic_url": "https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/69f08c0f-8d66-4b63-8d88-97af005d6bab_2126x2126.png",
  "reactions": {
    "\u2764": 49
  },
  "liked_by": [
    "Lenny Rachitsky"
  ],
  "status": "published",
  "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth/comment/13180393",
  "children": [
    {
      "comment_id": "13190378",
      "body": "Thank you Daniel!",
      "date": "2023-02-28 21:45:14",
      "author": "jorgemazal1",
      "author_name": "Jorge Mazal",
      "author_id": "25411757",
      "author_url": "https://substack.com/@jorgemazal1",
      "likes": 5,
      "replies": 0,
      "restacks": 0,
      "is_author": true,
      "is_pinned": false,
      "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth/comment/13190378",
      "children": []
    }
  ]
}

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.