Substack Scraper: Posts, Likes, Comments & Free Post Text

Scrape any Substack newsletter archive: post title, date, authors, likes, comments, restacks, word count, paywall flag, and free post text. Export JSON/CSV.

What it does

Reads each publication's public archive and returns posts newest-first with engagement metrics. Optional plain text of free posts. Export clean, deduplicated data as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS, or connect directly via the Apify REST API, Python/JavaScript SDKs, CLI, MCP Server, n8n, Make, or Zapier — with no login, cookies, or browser overhead.

Use cases

• Newsletter Sponsorship & Media Buying: Rank Substack publications by average likes, comments, restacks, posting frequency, and free vs. paywalled ratio.
• Creator & Journalist Research: Export complete post archives across multiple Substack subdomains or custom domains in seconds without login.
• AI / RAG Content Datasets: Extract clean plain-text bodies (includeContent: true) from free public Substack articles for research and LLM pipelines.
• Scheduled Topic Monitoring: Run daily with onlyNew: true to ingest new newsletter issues as soon as they publish.

Why use this scraper?

Feature	This Actor	Generic Browser / HTML Scrapers
Architecture	Direct structured API / JSON / feed requests (curl_cffi)	Heavy headless browser automation
Speed & reliability	2–25 seconds for 50–200 items	Minutes of high compute burn
Pricing model	Pay per result ($0.00 actor-start fee)	Monthly rental or high CU overhead
Error handling	Failed inputs logged in ERRORS key-value record and never charged	Bills compute time even on failures

Input parameters

• Publications (publications, array): Substack subdomains (e.g. 'astralcodexten'), *.substack.com URLs or custom-domain Substack URLs.
• Max posts per publication (maxPostsPerPublication, integer): Newest posts first. You are charged per post returned.
• Published after (YYYY-MM-DD) (publishedAfter, string): Optional. Stop at posts older than this date.
• Include free post text (includeContent, boolean): Adds the plain-text body of free posts (higher per-post price). Paywalled bodies are never returned.
• Only new posts (onlyNew, boolean): On scheduled runs, return only posts not seen in earlier runs.
• Delay between requests (delaySeconds, number): Polite pause between requests (default 0.7).

Example input

{
  "publications": [
    "astralcodexten",
    "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com"
  ],
  "maxPostsPerPublication": 30
}

Output & example output

One dataset row per result. Default table view columns: coverImage, publicationUrl, title, postDate, authors, likes, comments, restacks, wordcount, isPaywalled, url. Full structured JSON is stored in the run's default dataset.

Example output item

{
  "publicationUrl": "https://astralcodexten.substack.com",
  "publicationId": 89120,
  "postId": 212349428,
  "url": "https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ghost-in-my",
  "title": "Your Book Review: The Ghost In My Brain",
  "subtitle": "Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest",
  "type": "newsletter",
  "postDate": "2026-10-23T23:45:42.358Z",
  "audience": "everyone",
  "isPaywalled": false,
  "authors": [
    "Scott Alexander"
  ],
  "likes": 130,
  "comments": 101,
  "restacks": 1,
  "wordcount": 4187,
  "tags": [],
  "coverImage": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wVWo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F621384df-793b-4ff7-b...",
  "description": "Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest",
  "podcastUrl": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-25T04:27:04+00:00"
}

Pricing (Pay-Per-Result)

This Actor uses transparent Pay-Per-Event pricing with a $0.00 actor-start fee:

Event	What is charged	Price
post-result	Post scraped (One post with metadata and engagement)	$0.002 / result ($2.00 / 1,000 results)
post-with-content	Post scraped with text (One post with metadata plus free-post body text)	$0.003 / result ($3.00 / 1,000 results)
apify-actor-start	Actor start fee	$0.00

Concrete pricing math

• post-result (Post scraped): 1,000 results = $2.00 (50 results = $0.10, 10,000 results = $20.00). Apify's $5.00/month Free Tier covers up to 2,500 results/month at $0.00 out-of-pocket.
• post-with-content (Post scraped with text): 1,000 results = $3.00 (50 results = $0.15, 10,000 results = $30.00). Apify's $5.00/month Free Tier covers up to 1,666 results/month at $0.00 out-of-pocket.
• Empty runs (0 results) & skipped duplicates (onlyNew / onlyChanged): $0.00.

Data and compliance

Free content only: paywalled post bodies are never returned. No subscriber data. Requests are rate-limited and routed through Apify Proxy. Per-input errors are recorded in the run's ERRORS key-value record and are never charged.

FAQ

Do I need an account, login, or API key?
No. This Actor queries public endpoints directly and requires zero credentials.

What happens if I start a run with empty {} input via API or CLI?
Every required input defines both prefill and default values in .actor/input_schema.json, so an empty {} run automatically returns 50+ live records out of the box.