Substack Trending Posts Scraper

Get the posts currently trending across all of Substack, as featured on its explore page. Returns each post's title, author, publication, publication date, engagement and paywall status.

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

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

{
  "title": "How Trump Enforcers are Sabotaging Efforts to Bring Down Drug Prices",
  "subtitle": "Everyone hates pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, the middlemen raising drug prices. So why did Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson issue them a corporate pardon?",
  "url": "https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-pharma-middlemen-turned-the-federal",
  "date": "2026-10-10 19:18:47",
  "author": "mattstoller",
  "author_name": "Matt Stoller",
  "author_id": "759128",
  "author_url": "https://substack.com/@mattstoller",
  "source": "Substack",
  "domain": "substack.com",
  "snippet": "Everyone hates pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, the middlemen raising drug prices. So why did Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson issue them a corporate pardon?",
  "likes": 172,
  "comments": 23,
  "restacks": 33,
  "reactions": {
    "\u2764": 172
  },
  "is_paid": false,
  "audience": "everyone",
  "type": "newsletter",
  "wordcount": 2205,
  "lang": "en",
  "cover_image_url": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uRXI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F\u2026",
  "podcast_url": "",
  "podcast_duration": 0,
  "tags": [
    "pharmacy benefit managers"
  ],
  "publication": "BIG by Matt Stoller",
  "publication_id": "11524",
  "publication_url": "https://www.thebignewsletter.com",
  "slug": "how-pharma-middlemen-turned-the-federal",
  "post_id": "217288945",
  "authors": [
    {
      "username": "mattstoller",
      "name": "Matt Stoller",
      "user_id": "759128"
    }
  ],
  "replies": 0,
  "audio_url": "",
  "podcast_image_url": "",
  "video_duration": 0
}

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.