Substack User Profile Scraper

Get a Substack author's full profile by handle, user ID or profile URL. Returns display name, bio, follower count, subscriber badge, bestseller tier, the publications they write for, profile links, X handle and leaderboard placement and the publications they subscribe to.

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
username	string	no	Substack handle, e.g. lenny, with or without a leading @ (max 100 characters). Provide one of username, user_id or url.
user_id	string	no	Numeric Substack user ID, as returned in user_id. Provide one of username, user_id or url.
url	string	no	Profile URL, e.g. https://substack.com/@lenny (max 500 characters). Provide one of username, user_id or url.

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

{
  "user": {
    "username": "lenny",
    "full_name": "Lenny Rachitsky",
    "user_id": "1849774",
    "biography": "Writing \u2022 Angel investing \u2022 Advising",
    "profile_pic_url": "https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/afba5161-65bb-4d99-8d6b-cce660917fa1_1540x1540.png",
    "follower_count": 1383966,
    "subscriber_count": 1200000,
    "subscriber_count_label": "1.2M+",
    "bestseller_tier": 10000,
    "is_bestseller": true,
    "paid_subscriber_band": "Tens of thousands",
    "paid_subscriber_floor": 10000,
    "primary_publication": {
      "publication_id": "10845",
      "name": "Lenny's Newsletter",
      "subdomain": "lenny",
      "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
      "logo_url": "https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/441213db-4824-4e48-9d28-a3a18952cbfc_592x592.png"
    },
    "date_joined": "2021-05-01 23:55:21",
    "url": "https://substack.com/@lenny",
    "publications": [
      {
        "publication_id": "10845",
        "name": "Lenny's Newsletter",
        "subdomain": "lenny",
        "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
        "logo_url": "https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/441213db-4824-4e48-9d28-a3a18952cbfc_592x592.png",
        "role": "admin"
      }
    ],
    "links": [
      {
        "type": "twitter",
        "label": "",
        "url": "https://x.com/lennysan"
      }
    ],
    "twitter_handle": "lennysan",
    "leaderboard": {
      "category": "Business",
      "category_id": 62,
      "rank": 1,
      "board": "paid"
    },
    "subscriptions_count": 109,
    "slug": "lenny-rachitsky",
    "recommendation_count": 11,
    "has_guest_posts": true,
    "subscriptions": [
      {
        "publication_id": "6027",
     
  ... (truncated)

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.