Substack Scraper

Scrape Substack posts and newsletters:

• Newsletters: the posts of any newsletter, given as a URL, a custom domain or a Substack name. You get the newest or the most popular first, and can keep only posts after a date.
• Post URLs: single posts, with their full text.
• Search posts: posts from Substack's own search, across every newsletter.
• Find newsletters: newsletters by keyword, with their author, description and subscriber count. This is useful for sponsorship, outreach and guest-post lists.

Every post comes with its newsletter, authors, date, likes, comments, restacks, tags, word count, and whether it is paywalled. Turn on Include full text to add its text and HTML.

It needs no browser and no login, and it is fast: 28 posts with full text and 15 newsletters took 7 seconds. It costs $1 per 1,000 posts, and $2 per 1,000 newsletters.

What people use it for

• AI and LLM pipelines: expert writing on any topic as clean text, for RAG, summaries and research agents.
• Sponsorships and outreach: find newsletters in a niche and rank them by subscribers.
• Content research: which posts in a niche get the most likes, comments and restacks.
• Monitoring: new posts from a list of newsletters, day by day.

How to scrape Substack

1. Click Try for free; Apify's free plan covers a first run.
2. Enter Newsletters, Post URLs, Search posts or Find newsletters, and how many items you want per source.
3. Click Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read them through the API.

An input with more options:

{
  "newsletters": ["https://www.lennysnewsletter.com", "astralcodexten"],
  "searchQueries": ["ai agents"],
  "newsletterQueries": ["product management"],
  "maxItemsPerSource": 50,
  "sort": "new",
  "postedAfter": "2026-06-01",
  "includeContent": true
}

Output

A post:

{
  "type": "post",
  "title": "Announcing Lenny’s Jobs: The best place in the world to find, vet, and land your dream job",
  "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/announcing-lennys-jobs-the-best-place",
  "newsletter": "Lenny's Newsletter",
  "newsletterUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
  "authors": ["Lenny Rachitsky"],
  "postedAt": "2026-08-18T15:40:06.921Z",
  "audience": "everyone",
  "isPaywalled": false,
  "wordCount": 933,
  "likes": 378,
  "comments": 18,
  "restacks": 9,
  "tags": ["Career"],
  "text": "…",
  "html": "…"
}

A newsletter:

{
  "type": "newsletter",
  "name": "The Product Compass",
  "url": "https://www.productcompass.pm",
  "description": "The #1 AI & PM newsletter. Actionable tips, resources, and step-by-step playbooks to learn by doing.",
  "author": "Paweł Huryn",
  "authorHandle": "huryn",
  "language": "en",
  "subscribers": 141000,
  "subscribersText": "Hundreds of thousands of subscribers",
  "hasPaidPlan": true,
  "createdAt": "2022-06-19T06:45:53.181Z"
}

Use it as an API

One call runs it and returns the results as JSON (for runs under 5 minutes; longer ones start a run and read its dataset). Apify's Python and JavaScript clients, and its Make, Zapier and n8n integrations, work the same way.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/pikoulas~substack/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"newsletters": ["https://www.lennysnewsletter.com"], "newsletterQueries": ["product management"], "maxItemsPerSource": 5, "includeContent": true}'

AI agents can call it as a tool through Apify's MCP server: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=pikoulas/substack.

How much does it cost to scrape Substack?

You pay $0.001 per post, full text included, which is $1 per 1,000. Newsletters cost $0.002 each. Runs that go through Apify's residential proxy also pay its traffic, $0.0012 per 100 KB. There are no monthly fees.

Good to know

• Paid posts give their free preview only; isPaywalled tells them apart.
• subscribers is the count Substack shows, exact under a thousand and rounded above it ("79K+" is 79000); subscribersText is its wording, "Tens of thousands of subscribers".
• Newsletters that left Substack keep their old Substack archive, so their newest posts may be missing.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Substack?

It collects only what Substack shows publicly, without logging in. Scraping public data is generally legal, but personal data is protected by laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA, and Substack's terms may limit how you use what you collect. If you're unsure, ask a lawyer; Apify's Is web scraping legal? is a good start.

Something missing or not working?

Open an issue on the Issues tab with the input you used, or ask there for a field you need.