🚀 Substack Newsletter Scraper & Creator API

Extract rich datasets on Substack content creators, fast-growing newsletters, and recent metrics.

How to scrape Substack newsletters?

This Apify actor provides an API-first approach to scraping. Instead of generating heavy headless browser windows to scrape HTML, this tool uses blazing fast requests against internal Substack API endpoints and preloaded site payloads to guarantee 100% reliable extraction with zero browser overhead.

Newsletter Sponsorship Discovery

Looking for the absolute best platform for creator economy leads, PR outreach, and high-quality audience sponsorships?

Substack is the perfect platform to connect with audiences via hyper-targeted newsletter sponsorships. By taking arrays of newsletter URLs like https://pragmaticengineer.substack.com, you can extract deeply structured insights about each publication to measure its velocity and scale. Find accurate and responsive creator properties on demand.

Key Features

• Zero Headless Browsers: Bypasses DOM rendering and anti-bot systems for maximum performance and minimum failures.
• Deep Newsletter Understanding: Detects subscriber tier structure (Free vs Paid), author aliases, full description, and newsletter_name.
• Engagement Metrics Tracking: Fetches up to 10 recent_posts using sub-APIs to reveal the number of likes, comment counts, publish dates, and direct canonical links for each post to judge true reader engagement over time!
• Social Discovery: Safely aggregates connected social properties, such as a creator's linked Twitter/X footprint, for additional PR outreach vectors.
• Pay Per Result: Cost-effective data extraction, ensuring you only pay for the target URLs that successfully extract without failing.

Input Configuration

You can pass the following properties to configure the extraction:

Field	Type	Description
substack_urls	Array	An array of absolute URLs to target specific Substack newsletters. Example: ["https://pragmaticengineer.substack.com", "https://lenny.substack.com"].

JSON Example Output

{
  "newsletter_name": "The Pragmatic Engineer",
  "author": "Gergely Orosz",
  "description": "The #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Highly relevant for software engineers and engineering managers.",
  "subscriber_tier": "Paid/Free Tiers",
  "social_links": [
    "https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz"
  ],
  "recent_posts": [
    {
      "title": "Software Engineering in the AI Age",
      "url": "https://pragmaticengineer.substack.com/p/ai-coding",
      "likes": 842,
      "comments": 78,
      "published_at": "2025-05-18T14:30:20.000Z"
    }
  ]
}