Substack Scraper — Posts, Full Text, Stats & Comments

What does Substack Scraper do?

It extracts every post from any Substack newsletter: title, subtitle, date, authors, likes, comments, restacks, word count, paid/free status, cover image and the full text of free posts (a preview for paid ones). It can also collect comment threads with likes.

It works with name.substack.com and with custom domains like lennysnewsletter.com. It uses Substack's fast JSON API, so you don't need a login and runs are quick and reliable.

Use cases

• Content research: find a newsletter's best-performing posts (sort by Most popular)
• Competitor & creator analysis: posting frequency, engagement per post, paid vs. free mix
• LLM / RAG datasets: clean full text of newsletters
• Audience research: what readers say in the comments

Pricing

Result	Price
Post (with stats and text)	$0.002
Comment	$0.0005

🆓 On Apify's Free plan you can try it practically free (about $0.01 per 1,000 results). The prices above apply to paid plans.

For example, a newsletter's last 100 posts cost $0.20.

Input example

{ "publications": ["lennysnewsletter.com", "astralcodexten.com"], "maxPostsPerPublication": 100, "sort": "top", "includeComments": true }

Output examples

Post

{
  "type": "post",
  "publication": "https://lennysnewsletter.com",
  "id": 219482066,
  "title": "How to tell if a startup has a moat ",
  "subtitle": "A framework for assessing whether the company you’re considering joining is built to last",
  "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-tell-if-a-startup-has-a-moat",
  "slug": "how-to-tell-if-a-startup-has-a-moat",
  "postDate": "2026-10-13T12:45:41.160Z",
  "audience": "only_paid",
  "isPaid": true,
  "postType": "newsletter",
  "likes": 311,
  "comments": 2,
  "restacks": 11,
  "wordCount": 4153,
  "coverImage": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Uce!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb5a8d5c-1e31-45f5-b9f8-93426e87a971_1456x970.png",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Dan Hockenmaier",
      "handle": "danhock"
    }
  ],
  "contentText": "👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I share deeply researched product, growth, and career advice. For more: Lenny’s Jobs | Lenny’s Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | Become an AI-Nativ…"
}

Comment

{
  "type": "comment",
  "publication": "https://lennysnewsletter.com",
  "postId": 215694124,
  "postTitle": "All of the Lenny & Friends Summit talks are now online!",
  "commentId": 349085941,
  "text": "Thank you Lenny for putting this together. It feels amazing to see the world's best product thinkers wrestling with the same questions out loud.",
  "author": "Product Mindset",
  "authorHandle": "productmindset",
  "date": "2026-09-29T23:34:47.245Z",
  "likes": 4,
  "parentId": null
}

Is it legal?

This Actor reads public data from Substack's public API. Respect authors' copyright, and don't republish paid content.

Feedback

Open an issue in the Issues tab. Requests usually ship within a few days.