Substack Publications & Posts Scraper

What does Substack Publications & Posts Scraper do?

It discovers Substack publications, either by browsing a public topic category (Technology, Business, Culture, Crypto and 28 more) or from a list of publications you name directly, then pulls each one's most recent posts with the author, subscriber count, engagement numbers and the publication's recommended sister publications. Set a category and post count and you get a clean, deduplicated table of newsletters and their latest content in one run. Pricing is per result: you only pay for posts actually returned.

Data source

The Actor reads Substack's own public JSON API (the same endpoints substack.com and every *.substack.com site call from the browser): the category leaderboard for discovery, /api/v1/posts for each publication's post archive, and /api/v1/recommendations for cross-promotions. No login, no scraping of rendered HTML, data as fresh as the live site.

Why use it?

• Lead generation: find active newsletter operators in your niche along with their subscriber tier and contact handle.
• Content monitoring: track what competitors or influencers in a topic are publishing, how often, and how it performs (comments, reactions, restacks).
• Market research: measure which publications in a category are growing (subscriber counts) and who they cross-promote.
• Replaces manually browsing Substack's leaderboard and each publication's archive page by hand.

How to use it

1. Open the Actor and pick one or more categories, or list specific publications by subdomain or URL.
2. Click Start. Download results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read them through the API.
3. Add a Schedule and an Integration (Slack, Google Sheets, webhook) to get new posts automatically.

Input

Field	Description
categories	Discover publications from Substack's public category leaderboards (Technology, Business, Culture, and 29 more). Default: ["technology"].
publicationSubdomains	Optional list of exact publications to include, as a subdomain, bare name, or full substack.com URL (e.g. platformer, garbageday.substack.com). Runs in addition to any categories.
postsPerPublication	How many of each publication's most recent posts to return. Default 3, max 20.
maxPublications	Cap on distinct publications crawled across all selected categories. Default 15, max 100.
includeRecommendations	Attach each publication's publicly recommended sister publications to its post records. Default true.
maxResults	Hard stop for the run. You are billed per result, so this caps the cost.
proxyConfiguration	Apify proxy is recommended for larger runs.

Example input:

{
    "categories": ["technology"],
    "postsPerPublication": 3,
    "maxPublications": 15,
    "includeRecommendations": true,
    "maxResults": 60
}

Output

Every record is one post, enriched with its publication and author:

{
    "id": "careerbrew:216893901",
    "title": "Career Brew - 53 Hottest Early to Mid Career Jobs",
    "subtitle": "$147K at Mastercard; $195K at NVIDIA; $220K at HighLevel and many more",
    "url": "https://careerbrew.substack.com/p/career-brew-28th-sep-53-hottest-early",
    "postDate": "2026-09-28T17:56:05.255Z",
    "publicationName": "Career Brew",
    "publicationSubdomain": "careerbrew",
    "authorName": "Career Brew",
    "category": "technology",
    "postId": 216893901,
    "publicationId": 2333426,
    "publicationUrl": "https://careerbrew.substack.com",
    "authorHandle": "careerbrew",
    "type": "newsletter",
    "audience": "everyone",
    "wordcount": 612,
    "commentCount": 0,
    "reactionCount": 8,
    "restacks": 1,
    "subscriberTier": null,
    "freeSubscriberCount": 355000,
    "freeSubscriberCountDisplay": "355K+",
    "publicationRank": 5,
    "heroText": "Increasing accessibility to education and career opportunities...",
    "coverImage": "https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/...",
    "logoUrl": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/...",
    "recommendedPublications": [
        { "name": "The Founders Corner®", "subdomain": "thefoundercorner" },
        { "name": "The VC Corner", "subdomain": "thevccorner" }
    ],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-30T08:18:47.916Z"
}

Field	Meaning
id	Stable key (subdomain:postId), safe for deduplication between runs
title, subtitle, url	Post headline, summary and canonical link
postDate	ISO date the post was published
publicationName, publicationSubdomain, publicationUrl	The newsletter it belongs to
authorName, authorHandle	Byline of the post
category	The category it was discovered under, or null if it came from publicationSubdomains
type, audience	newsletter/podcast/thread; who can read it (everyone, only_paid, founding)
wordcount, commentCount, reactionCount, restacks	Engagement numbers
freeSubscriberCount, freeSubscriberCountDisplay	Publication's free subscriber count, exact and rounded; only available for publications found via categories, since Substack does not expose it on a per-publication lookup
subscriberTier	Author's public subscriber milestone badge, when Substack has assigned one
recommendedPublications	Up to 5 publications this one recommends to its readers

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee when a run starts, then a fixed price per result returned. You only pay for posts that pass your filters. Set maxResults to cap any run.

Limitations

• Only covers publications still hosted on *.substack.com or a Substack-managed custom domain; publications that migrated off Substack (their own site, their own API) are not covered.
• freeSubscriberCount and publicationRank are only populated for publications discovered through categories; publications you name directly in publicationSubdomains do not expose subscriber counts through a public per-publication lookup.
• Only public, published posts are returned. Paywalled post bodies are not fetched, only their public metadata (title, engagement, audience).

FAQ

Is this legal? The Actor reads the same public JSON API Substack's own pages call for any visitor without a login, and stores only publication and post metadata the site publishes for that purpose. You are responsible for how you use the data.

Something is missing or broken? Open an issue in the Issues tab; response time is usually under a day.