Substack Leaderboard Scraper

Substack Leaderboard Scraper returns the newsletters listed on Substack's category leaderboards, one row per listing: rank, category, newsletter name and link, author, tagline, paid subscriber tier, the subscriber count Substack displays, launch date, language, and whether it sells subscriptions or runs a podcast. Pick categories such as Technology or Finance, choose how deep to go and click Start. Substack publishes paid subscribers only as a band such as Thousands of paid subscribers, never as an exact number. It costs $1.00 per 1,000 leaderboard entries on the Free plan ($0.50 on Business), and the $5 of monthly credit in Apify's Free plan covers about 5,000 leaderboard entries.

What data does it return?

Field	Description
rank, rankingList	Position on the leaderboard, 1 at the top, and the list it comes from: all for the overall list, paid for the list Substack ranks by paid subscriptions.
category, categoryId	The leaderboard's category, such as Technology, and Substack's ID for it, such as 4.
name, url	Newsletter name and its home page, on its own domain when it has one.
subdomain, customDomain	The part before .substack.com, and the newsletter's own domain such as www.lennysnewsletter.com, null when it has none.
author, authorHandle	Public name and Substack handle of the publication's author. Some newsletters show the publication name here instead of a person.
description	Tagline from the newsletter's home page.
subscriberTier	Paid audience as Substack words it, from Hundreds of paid subscribers up to Hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers. null when Substack shows no paid band for the newsletter.
freeSubscribers	Subscriber count shown on the listing, rounded by Substack, such as 271000. null when the newsletter hides it.
paidEnabled	true when the newsletter sells paid subscriptions.
launchedAt, firstPostAt	When the publication was created on Substack and when its first post is dated, ISO 8601 in UTC. A newsletter that imported an older archive has a first post before its launch.
language, hasPodcast, explicit	Language code such as en, whether the newsletter publishes a podcast, and whether it is marked as explicit.
logo, coverImage	Links to the newsletter logo and cover image, null when missing.
id, key	Substack's publication ID, and the row key dir:<categoryId>:<list>:<subdomain> that new-only mode compares between runs.
checkedAt	When the leaderboard page was read, ISO 8601 in UTC.

With Include latest posts on, rows of type post follow the newsletter rows. They carry title, subtitle, url, publishedAt, audience (everyone, only_paid or founding), postType, authors, wordCount, likes, comments, restacks and the previewText Substack shows in listings, but not the full text of the post.

How to scrape Substack leaderboards

1. In Categories, enter category names as Substack writes them, such as Technology, U.S. Politics or Health & Wellness. Upper and lower case and the & sign do not matter, and Substack's numeric category IDs work too. Leave the field empty for all 33 categories.
2. Pick the Ranking list: All newsletters or Paid newsletters (by paid subscribers). A newsletter usually holds a different rank on each list.
3. Set Newsletters per category. Substack serves 25 per page, so the top 100 takes four pages per category.
4. For recent posts as well, turn on Include latest posts and set Maximum posts per newsletter (3 by default). Published after, Audience and Keywords (any of) narrow those posts and never remove a newsletter row.
5. Click Start. The rows appear in the Output tab and can be exported as CSV, Excel or JSON. The SUMMARY record in the key-value store counts the rows by type, names any category it did not recognize and lists categories that were not read in full under categoriesIncomplete.

An API input for the paid lists of three categories with their latest October posts:

{
  "categories": ["Technology", "Finance", "Science"],
  "ranking": "paid",
  "maxPerCategory": 100,
  "includePosts": true,
  "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 3,
  "publishedAfter": "2026-10-01"
}

Example output

The third newsletter on the overall Technology leaderboard in a run on 11 October 2026. Its first post is older than its launch on Substack because the archive was imported.

{
  "type": "newsletter",
  "key": "dir:4:all:piratewires",
  "id": 5931581,
  "name": "Pirate Wires",
  "subdomain": "piratewires",
  "customDomain": null,
  "url": "https://piratewires.substack.com",
  "author": "Pirate Wires",
  "authorHandle": "piratewires",
  "description": "An American media company reporting at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture. Subscribe, or die.",
  "logo": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QQiX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feed454fe-ae6d-484b-bd7a-026c6ccba7b8_250x250.png",
  "coverImage": null,
  "language": "en",
  "launchedAt": "2025-08-08T17:42:37.955Z",
  "firstPostAt": "2019-01-29T21:39:00.000Z",
  "paidEnabled": true,
  "subscriberTier": "Thousands of paid subscribers",
  "freeSubscribers": 271000,
  "hasPodcast": true,
  "explicit": false,
  "category": "Technology",
  "categoryId": "4",
  "rank": 3,
  "rankingList": "all",
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-11T15:51:20.212Z"
}

How much does it cost to scrape Substack leaderboards?

	Free plan	Starter	Scale	Business
1,000 leaderboard entries	$1.00	$0.80	$0.65	$0.50
Post, per 1,000	$0.80	$0.64	$0.52	$0.40

You pay only for the events in the table. There is no start fee, and compute time and proxies are included.

The top 100 of 10 categories is 1,000 rows and costs $1.00 on the Free plan or $0.50 on Business. Three latest posts for each of those newsletters add up to 3,000 post rows, another $2.40 on the Free plan. Posts that Published after, Audience or Keywords (any of) remove, and rows already returned to a watch in new-only mode, are not charged.

Limits

• Leaderboard depth differs by category and list. On 11 October 2026 the overall Comics list ended after 248 newsletters, and the paid Technology list after 525, where Substack answers the next page with HTTP 400 and the actor takes that as the end of the list.
• Substack limits fast reading from one address with HTTP 429. The actor reads at most one leaderboard page a second, and after a 429 it waits as long as Substack asks, or 15 seconds, and goes on more slowly. A run of all 33 categories at 100 each on 11 October 2026 returned all 3,300 rows in about 3 minutes, with two such pauses. If Substack keeps refusing, the actor stops asking and returns what it has, and the status message and categoriesIncomplete in SUMMARY name the categories that are missing or partial.
• Newsletter archives fall under the same limit and pace: with Include latest posts on for the paid Finance and Science lists (50 each), 99 of the 100 archives were read in under 2 minutes. The one newsletter whose site refused its archive with HTTP 403 came without posts, and the status message said so.
• freeSubscribers was filled for 1,782 of 1,975 listings in the top 100 run, between 1,000 and 3,000,000 with a median of 40,000. Substack rounds it.
• Each category and list makes its own row, so a newsletter listed in two categories appears twice: 42 newsletters did so in the top 100 of all categories.
• A run returns at most 10,000 rows unless you raise Maximum rows.

Tracking new entrants and rank moves

Save the input as a task, or give it a Watch name, and schedule it daily. Every such run writes a CHANGES record that compares the listings with the previous run: added and removed count newsletters that entered or left the leaderboards you read, and each item in changes gives a row key, its kind (added, removed or changed) and, for rank moves, the old and new rank. With Return only rows new since the last run on, the dataset holds only the newsletters that entered since then. Rows cut off by Maximum rows are kept for the next run.

Which categories are covered

Substack has 33 leaderboard categories: Technology, Business, Culture, Finance, U.S. Politics, World Politics, Health Politics, News, International, Food & Drink, Podcasts, Sports, Art & Illustration, Fashion & Beauty, Music, Faith & Spirituality, Climate & Environment, Science, Literature, Fiction, Health & Wellness, Design, Travel, Parenting, Philosophy, Comics, Crypto, Humor, History, Education, Film & TV, Games and Home & Garden. The actor reads the current list from Substack at the start of each run, so a category Substack adds later is picked up without a change.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Substack leaderboards?

The leaderboards are public pages that Substack shows to anyone without an account. The actor stores what a listing shows about a newsletter: its name, rank, tagline, the public name of its author and the subscriber figures Substack chooses to display. It collects no subscriber lists, email addresses or reader accounts, and you are responsible for how you use the data.

What is the difference between the two lists?

All newsletters is Substack's overall ranking of a category. Paid newsletters ranks only newsletters with paid plans, by paid subscriptions, and almost every row on it has a subscriberTier. Run the actor once per list to compare them, and give each list its own Watch name when you track changes.

How do I get the full text of the posts?

This actor returns post metadata and the preview. Pass the url values of the newsletters to Substack Scraper, which reads whole archives with the text of each post and its comments.

Related scrapers

• Substack Scraper
• Substack Comments Scraper
• Apple Podcasts Scraper

Support

This actor is built and maintained by deriverge s.r.o., a software company based in the Czech Republic. If a run fails or a field you need is missing, please open an issue in the Issues tab or write to us at info@deriverge.com. We respond in English and Czech. Runs can be scheduled in Apify Console or started from the API tab, which has examples for Python, JavaScript and cURL and works with Make, Zapier, n8n and the Apify MCP server. If the actor saves you time, a short review helps other people find it.