Substack Scraper — Newsletters, Subscribers, Posts

Scrape Substack newsletters and their posts: subscriber count, paid prices, author followers and social links, plus every post with likes, comments, restacks, word count, free or paid, and optionally the full text, the HTML and the comments. Search posts by topic across all of Substack and discover the top newsletters of any category (Technology, Business, Finance…). No login. $0.50 per 1,000 posts, no start fee.

Free tier — 20 results free on every run

The first 20 results of every run are free, on every run you ever make — not a one-off trial. One guard: the free allowance never covers more than half of a run, so the offer stays sustainable.

What does this Substack scraper do?

Give it newsletters (a link to any page, a custom domain, name.substack.com or just lenny) and/or categories. For each newsletter you get one row with its card — subscribers, paid plans, author, followers, socials — followed by its posts, newest first, back to the date you choose.

Compared with automation-lab/substack-scraper

Read on the Store on 2026-10-23 (Substack Scraper). Where it does better, this section says so.

• Built on the site's own data, not a resold scraper: no second Actor between you and the source.
• Free results on every run and a hard cost cap (maxTotalChargeUsd).
• Price: $2 per 1,000 here, $1.15 there.

Why use it

1. Subscriber counts and prices on every newsletter — ready for sponsorship and partnership prospecting.
2. Category discovery: the top 25 to 1,000 newsletters of a category, ranked, with their numbers. Find the right newsletters to sponsor in minutes.
3. Engagement per post: likes, comments, restacks and word count, free or paid.
4. Full text of free posts for AI, RAG, summaries and research (paid posts: public preview, charged as a plain post).
5. Cheaper than the market leader and no start fee.
6. API, n8n, Make, Zapier and MCP ready.

How to use it in 3 steps

1. Click Try for free — a newsletter and a category are prefilled.
2. Add newsletters or categories; choose how many posts and whether you want the text.
3. Click Start and download JSON, CSV or Excel.

Input

Field	What it does
newsletters	Links, custom domains, name.substack.com or subdomains.
categories	Leaderboard categories: Technology, Business, Finance, Culture, Politics, Science, Crypto, Health & Wellness, Food & Drink, Sports…
maxNewslettersPerCategory	Top-ranked first, 1 to 1,000. Default 25.
paidOnly	Use the paid leaderboard (ranked by paid subscribers).
maxPostsPerNewsletter	0 to 5,000, newest first. 0 = newsletter info only. Default 20.
includeText	Full text of free posts (preview of paid posts).
postedAfter	Optional YYYY-MM-DD: only posts on or after it.
postedBefore	Optional YYYY-MM-DD: only posts on or before it.
keywords	Topics to search across all of Substack (up to 50).
maxPostsPerKeyword	Posts per topic, 1 to 500. Default 20.
contentType	all (default), newsletter, podcast or thread.
onlyFree	Skip paywalled posts.
includeHtml	Add the full HTML body next to the plain text.
includeComments / maxCommentsPerPost	Add each post's comments and replies in commentsList (up to 2,000 per post). No extra charge.
maxTotalChargeUsd	Optional hard cost cap for the run.

{
  "categories": ["Technology", "Business"],
  "maxNewslettersPerCategory": 100,
  "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 0
}

Output

Real examples. A newsletter row:

{
  "type": "newsletter",
  "name": "Lenny's Newsletter",
  "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
  "subscribers": 1200000,
  "subscribersText": "1.2M+",
  "leaderboardBadge": "Tens of thousands of paid subscribers",
  "paidEnabled": true,
  "monthlyPriceUsd": 20.0,
  "yearlyPriceUsd": 200.0,
  "hasPodcast": true,
  "firstPostDate": "2019-06-14T15:00:48.833Z",
  "authorName": "Lenny Rachitsky",
  "authorFollowers": 1381643,
  "authorSocials": {
    "twitter": "https://x.com/lennysan",
    "youtube": "https://www.youtube.com/c/LennysPodcast"
  },
  "authorWebsite": "https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/",
  "profileUrl": "https://substack.com/@lenny"
}

A post row:

{
  "type": "post",
  "newsletterUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
  "title": "All of the Lenny & Friends Summit talks are now online!",
  "subtitle": "Plus, some reflections and takeaways from the day",
  "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/all-of-the-lenny-and-friends-summit",
  "postDate": "2026-09-29T13:15:57.512Z",
  "audience": "free",
  "likes": 263,
  "comments": 5,
  "restacks": 4,
  "wordCount": 1276,
  "authors": ["Lenny Rachitsky"]
}

With includeText, posts also carry text and textIsFull.

How much does it cost?

Event	Price
Newsletter (card with subscribers, prices, author, socials)	$0.002
Post (title, date, likes, comments, restacks…)	$0.0005 ($0.50 per 1,000)
Post with full text (free posts)	$0.001
Start fee	none

Up to 20 results of every run are free (at most half of the run). Newsletters that do not exist are reported and never charged. Paid Apify plans get lower tier prices.

Use cases

• Newsletter sponsorship — the biggest newsletters of a niche, with subscribers and prices.
• Creator and influencer outreach — authors with followers and social links.
• Content research — what performs (likes, comments, restacks) in a niche.
• AI and RAG — clean full text of free posts with dates and authors.
• Monitoring — new posts of a list of newsletters with a daily schedule and postedAfter.

Use it from code (API)

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("om_kh/substack-scraper").call(run_input={
    "categories": ["Finance"],
    "maxNewslettersPerCategory": 50,
    "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 0,
})
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(row["name"], row.get("subscribers"), row.get("monthlyPriceUsd"))

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/om_kh~substack-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"newsletters": ["lenny"], "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 10}'

Integrations and MCP

Schedule it daily with postedAfter and send new posts to Slack, Notion or Google Sheets with n8n, Make or Zapier. AI agents can call it through https://mcp.apify.com as om_kh/substack-scraper.

Tips and limits

• Subscriber counts are the ones Substack shows publicly (exact for most, rounded like "1.2M+" for the largest).
• contactEmail is filled only when the newsletter publishes a support email.
• Comments' text and paid post bodies need a subscription and are not offered.

FAQ

Do I need a Substack account? No.

Is it legal? It reads what newsletters publish publicly. Use the data in line with the laws and terms that apply to you.

Related Actors

• YouTube Channel Email Scraper - Business Emails, Socials — creators on YouTube.
• Google News Scraper - Headlines, Source, Date, API — news coverage of the same topics.
• Hacker News Scraper - Posts, Points, Comment Count — where tech newsletters get discussed.

Your feedback

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