Substack Scraper: Newsletter Finder, Subscribers & Prices

Find Substack newsletters by category, bestseller list, rising list or search, and get one report per newsletter: subscriber count and tier, paid subscriber tier, monthly and yearly price, leaderboard rank, posting pace, likes and comments per post, share of paywalled posts and its top posts. Every post behind the reports comes as CSV too.

Built for sponsors looking for newsletters to advertise in, and for writers sizing up a niche. No login, no API key, no proxy.

What does this Substack scraper do?

Business bestsellers · 30 newsletters · 580 posts · under 2 minutes

 #1  Lenny's Newsletter    1.2M subscribers   $20/mo   0.8 posts/wk   median 411 likes
 #2  Noahpinion            458K subscribers   $10/mo   3.5 posts/wk   median 392 likes, 77 comments
 #19 One Useful Thing      480K subscribers   $10/mo   no paywall     median 1,000 likes

1. Find newsletters: Substack's bestseller (top paid) and rising lists for 26 categories, the full category directory, a search of Substack writers, or your own list of addresses.
2. Read each one: its listing, its full publication record, its author's public profile and its latest posts.
3. One row per newsletter that makes them comparable: audience, price, activity and engagement.

Who is it for?

• Advertisers and sponsorship buyers: shortlist newsletters by real audience and engagement, not just rank
• Agencies and media buyers: build and refresh a newsletter media list for a niche
• Newsletter writers: see what the leaders in your category charge, how often they post and what gets engagement
• Investors and analysts: track the Substack creator economy by category
• PR teams: find the newsletters that matter in a topic

What data do you get?

One report per newsletter (the dataset):

Field	What it tells you
name, url, description, language, launchedAt, authorName	Who it is
subscriberCount	Exact subscribers, when the author shows the number publicly
totalSubscribersTier, paidSubscribersTier	Substack's own tiers, e.g. "Hundreds of thousands of subscribers", "Thousands of paid subscribers"
authorFollowers	The author's Substack followers
leaderboardCategory, leaderboardRank, leaderboardType	Where it ranks on Substack's bestseller or rising list
offersPaidSubscription, monthlyPrice, yearlyPrice, foundingPrice, currency, freeTrial	What readers pay
postsPerWeek, postsLast30Days, lastPostAt, daysSinceLastPost	How active it is
medianLikes, medianComments, medianRestacks, medianWordCount	How readers respond, and how long posts are
paywalledPostsPercent, podcastPostsPercent	How much is behind the paywall, and how much is audio
recommendsNewsletters	How many newsletters it recommends (a sign of an active network)
topPosts, latestPost	The best-liked recent posts, with links

Every post (POSTS_CSV): title, link, date, type, audience (free or paid), likes, comments, restacks and word count.

Examples from live runs, 29 September 2026

Business bestsellers, 30 newsletters, 580 posts, in 113 seconds:

Rank	Newsletter	Subscribers	Price	Posts / week	Median likes
1	Lenny's Newsletter	1,200,000	$20 / month	0.8	411
2	Noahpinion	458,000	$10 / month	3.5	392
11	Prof G Media	424,000	$20 / month	20.0	22
19	One Useful Thing	480,000	$10 / month	0.3	1,000
20	Energy Outlook Advisors	16,000	$420 / month	2.0	11

The table shows why rank alone misleads a sponsor. One Useful Thing posts about once every three weeks and draws a median of 1,000 likes, while Prof G Media posts 20 times a week at 22. Energy Outlook Advisors reaches a small audience that pays $420 a month.

Technology bestsellers: SemiAnalysis (#1, 318,000 subscribers, $50 a month), The Pragmatic Engineer (#3, 1.1 million, $15 a month), Exponential View (#6, 166,000, recommends 77 other newsletters).

Rising lists for finance and food returned 20 newsletters, from Cassandra Unchained (336,000 subscribers, $49 a month) to What To Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking (590,000 subscribers, $7 a month).

How to use it

1. Pick categories and which list: bestsellers, rising, or all newsletters in the category.
2. Or paste specific newsletters (https://name.substack.com, a custom domain, or https://substack.com/@handle), or search Substack writers.
3. Set how many newsletters per category and posts per newsletter.
4. Run it and download the reports and posts as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Pricing

$0.01 per newsletter report and $0.001 per post saved.

A newsletter with 20 posts costs $0.03. The 30 Business bestsellers above, with all 580 posts, cost $0.88, or $0.30 for the reports alone.

Good to know

• Subscriber numbers are what Substack shows publicly. Tiers ("Tens of thousands of subscribers") appear for most established newsletters. The exact subscriberCount appears only when the author shows it, and only on the author's primary newsletter.
• Search matches writers, not topics. Substack's search returns a few writers per page, so categories and lists find far more newsletters.
• A few custom domains refuse automated requests. Those newsletters keep their listing details (rank, tiers, prices, subscribers), and the run summary says their posts could not be read. In testing, this was 1 newsletter in 30.
• Likes, comments and restacks are Substack's public counts on each post at the time of the run.
• No personal data. Newsletters and their public authors only: no subscribers, commenters or readers.

Input

Field	Meaning
Categories	26 Substack categories
Which list	Bestsellers (top paid), Rising, or All newsletters in the category
Newsletters per category	1 to 500, 25 per page
Specific newsletters	Addresses, custom domains or substack.com/@handle profiles
Search Substack writers	Words to search for, and how many newsletters to take
Recent posts per newsletter	1 to 200
Also save every post	Adds the posts file; charged per post

Integrations

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel or Google Sheets, or connect through the Apify API, webhooks, Make, Zapier and n8n. Schedule it monthly to keep a sponsorship shortlist current, or weekly to watch a category's rising list.