Substack Scraper — Posts, Comments, Reactions + AFINN-165 Sentiment

Scrape any Substack publication: full post text, comments, nested replies, reactions, restacks. Built-in AFINN-165 sentiment analysis on every post and comment — no external API. Multi-publication batch, date filter, audience filter (free/paid/founding). HTTP-only, $0.003 per post / $0.005 per comment — the cheapest, cleanest way to monitor newsletters at scale.

⭐ Bookmark this Substack Scraper — Apify ranks actors by bookmarks, so it directly helps the visibility of this scraper on the Apify Store.

What is the Substack Scraper?

The Substack Scraper is an Apify actor that pulls structured data from any Substack publication. Drop in a publication URL and get back the full post archive — body text, comments (with full nested reply tree), reactions count, restacks count, paywall status, audience tier (free/paid/founding-only). Every post and every comment is sentiment-scored on the fly using the AFINN-165 lexicon with negation handling.

The cheapest, cleanest way to monitor the creator economy at scale: track newsletters in your space, surface high-engagement posts, run brand-mention monitoring across hundreds of Substacks at once.

Use cases

• Creator-economy research — track top Substacks in your sector, their post velocity, engagement.
• Brand monitoring — alert on every Substack post mentioning your brand + sentiment.
• Competitive intelligence — analyze a competitor's full post archive for content strategy.
• PR / journalism — find which Substacks cover your industry; monitor for new mentions.
• AI training data — Substack is high-quality long-form content, labeled with reactions and comments — perfect for RLHF.
• Newsletter benchmarking — compare engagement (reactions/comments) across Substacks of similar size.
• Content research — find which post topics drove the most subscriber growth (by audience-tier mix).

Input

{
  "publications": [
    "https://example1.substack.com/",
    "https://example2.substack.com/"
  ],
  "since": "2026-01-01",
  "includeComments": true,
  "audienceTiers": ["free", "paid"]
}

Output

{
  "publication": "example1.substack.com",
  "post_id": "12345678",
  "url": "https://example1.substack.com/p/example-post",
  "title": "Why MCP servers are the future of AI agents",
  "author": "Example Author",
  "published_at": "2026-04-25",
  "audience_tier": "free",
  "body_text": "Full post body text...",
  "reactions": 423,
  "restacks": 87,
  "comments_count": 34,
  "sentiment": "positive",
  "sentiment_score": 0.38
}

Pricing

PAY_PER_EVENT — $0.003 per post + $0.005 per comment. Sentiment analysis included free.

FAQ — Substack API alternatives

Substack official API? No public API. This scraper is the way to get structured data at scale.

Paywall content — does it scrape paid posts? Public preview only (the same content non-subscribers see). Full paid post text requires a logged-in cookie.

Why AFINN-165 sentiment? Fast, deterministic, runs in microseconds per item, no GPU. For deeper semantic sentiment, run downstream on the dataset.

How fast for bulk? ~5-10 posts/sec, ~20 comments/sec per actor instance. For 100 publications × 1K posts each, run 4 concurrent actor runs.

---

⭐ Found this useful? Bookmark this Substack Scraper — it's the strongest signal for Apify Store ranking.

Related actors

• Reddit Scraper — Posts + Sentiment — same sentiment engine for Reddit
• Trustpilot Scraper — Reviews + Sentiment — same sentiment engine for reviews
• Amazon Reviews Scraper — same sentiment engine for Amazon

License: MIT · Author: dltik