Substack Newsletter Scraper

Scrape articles from any Substack newsletter using the public Substack API. Supports both subdomain.substack.com URLs and custom domains (e.g., www.lennysnewsletter.com).

Features

• Scrape article metadata (title, author, date, reactions, comments, etc.)
• Optionally fetch full article HTML body
• Filter by audience (free/paid), content type, date range, or keyword
• Scrape multiple newsletters in a single run (comma-separated URLs)
• Concurrent batch fetching for full article bodies
• Polite rate limiting (500ms delay between requests)

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
newsletterUrl	string	required	Newsletter URL(s). Comma-separated for multiple.
maxItems	integer	50	Max articles per newsletter. 0 = unlimited.
sortBy	string	"new"	"new" (newest first) or "top" (most popular).
includeBody	boolean	false	Fetch full HTML body for each article.
audienceFilter	string	"all"	"all", "free", or "paid".
typeFilter	string	"all"	"all", "newsletter", "podcast", or "thread".
dateFrom	string	—	Only articles on/after this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
dateTo	string	—	Only articles on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
searchKeyword	string	—	Filter by keyword in title or description.

Example Input

{
    "newsletterUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "maxItems": 10,
    "sortBy": "new",
    "includeBody": false
}

Multiple Newsletters

{
    "newsletterUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com, https://stratechery.com",
    "maxItems": 20
}

Output

Each article is saved to the default dataset with the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
id	number	Substack post ID
title	string	Article title
subtitle	string	Article subtitle
slug	string	URL slug
url	string	Full canonical URL
postDate	string	ISO 8601 publish date
audience	string	"everyone" or "only_paid"
type	string	"newsletter", "podcast", or "thread"
wordcount	number	Word count
reactions	object	Reaction counts (e.g., {"❤": 532})
commentCount	number	Number of comments
coverImage	string	Cover image URL
author	string	Author name(s)
description	string	Article description/excerpt
body	string	Full HTML body (only when includeBody: true)

Example Output

{
    "id": 123456,
    "title": "How to build a great product",
    "subtitle": "Lessons from top PMs",
    "slug": "how-to-build-a-great-product",
    "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-great-product",
    "postDate": "2026-03-03T13:45:17.054Z",
    "audience": "everyone",
    "type": "newsletter",
    "wordcount": 2642,
    "reactions": { "❤": 532 },
    "commentCount": 9,
    "coverImage": "https://substackcdn.com/image/...",
    "author": "Lenny Rachitsky",
    "description": "A deep dive into product excellence..."
}

Notes

• Paid articles: Articles marked as "only_paid" may only return a preview of the body content.
• Rate limiting: The Actor adds a 500ms delay between API requests to avoid overloading Substack servers.
• Custom domains: Both newsletter.substack.com and custom domains like platformer.news are supported.
• No authentication required: Uses Substack's public API endpoints.

Cost

This Actor uses only HTTP API calls (no browser), so it's very lightweight:

• ~256MB memory is sufficient
• No proxy required
• A typical run of 50 articles completes in under a minute