Substack Newsletter Scraper: Posts, Full Text & Leaderboards

What does Substack Newsletter Scraper do?

Substack Newsletter Scraper extracts public data from any Substack newsletter, including those on custom domains. In one run you can collect:

• Posts with title, subtitle, URL, publish date, authors, paywall status, word count, likes, comments and restacks
• Full post text in Markdown (ready for AI, RAG and LLM pipelines), plain text or original HTML
• Newsletter profiles with author, creation date, language, subscription prices (monthly, yearly and founding plans), bestseller tier and subscriber ranking where Substack shows it
• Category leaderboards (Finance, Technology, Business, Politics, Culture and 25+ more) to discover the top newsletters in a niche, with their rank

It runs on the Apify platform, so you get API access, scheduling, webhooks and integrations (Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n and more) with no setup.

Why scrape Substack?

• Content research and monitoring: track what the leading writers in your industry publish and which posts get the most engagement.
• AI and RAG: turn a newsletter archive into clean Markdown for chatbots, summarizers and knowledge bases.
• Newsletter sponsorships and partnerships: build a list of the top newsletters in a category, with pricing and bestseller status, to find sponsorship or cross-promotion partners.
• Market and pricing research: compare subscription prices and paid-plan adoption across a niche.
• Competitor analysis: see how often competitors publish, what they write about and how readers respond.

How to use it

1. Enter one or more newsletters: a handle (lenny), a Substack address (lenny.substack.com), a custom domain (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com) or a single post URL.
2. (Optional) Choose leaderboard categories to discover newsletters instead.
3. Set how many posts you want, and turn on Include full post text if you need the article body.
4. Click Start, then download your data as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or fetch it with the API.

Input example

{
  "newsletters": ["https://www.lennysnewsletter.com", "noahpinion"],
  "maxPostsPerNewsletter": 50,
  "sort": "new",
  "includeContent": true,
  "contentFormat": "markdown",
  "dateFrom": "2026-01-01"
}

Discover the top paid Finance and Technology newsletters:

{
  "categories": ["finance", "technology"],
  "leaderboard": "paid",
  "maxPublicationsPerCategory": 100
}

Output example

Post:

{
  "type": "post",
  "newsletterName": "Astral Codex Ten",
  "newsletterUrl": "https://www.astralcodexten.com",
  "title": "An Open Letter To Steven Pinker On AI",
  "url": "https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/an-open-letter-to-steven-pinker-on",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-06T21:23:06.574Z",
  "postType": "newsletter",
  "audience": "everyone",
  "isPaywalled": false,
  "authors": ["Scott Alexander"],
  "wordCount": 10483,
  "reactionCount": 1037,
  "commentCount": 875,
  "restackCount": 177,
  "language": "en",
  "content": "Dear Steven:\n\nEarlier this month, frustrated by some of your social media posts, ...",
  "contentFormat": "markdown",
  "contentIsPreview": false
}

Newsletter profile or leaderboard entry:

{
  "type": "publication",
  "rank": 1,
  "category": "Finance",
  "name": "Example Finance Weekly",
  "url": "https://example.substack.com",
  "authorName": "Jane Writer",
  "createdAt": "2021-03-01T12:00:00.000Z",
  "language": "en",
  "paymentsEnabled": true,
  "plans": [
    { "planId": "monthly8usd", "interval": "month", "amount": 8.0, "currency": "USD" },
    { "planId": "yearly80usd", "interval": "year", "amount": 80.0, "currency": "USD" }
  ],
  "bestsellerTier": 100,
  "subscriberRanking": "Thousands of paid subscribers"
}

The dataset has two ready-made views: Posts and Newsletters.

How much does it cost?

You pay only for what you get:

Event	Price
Run start	$0.01
Post (metadata)	$0.008 ($8 per 1,000 posts)
Post with full text	$0.015 ($15 per 1,000 posts)
Newsletter profile or leaderboard entry	$0.02

For example, 100 posts with full Markdown text cost about $1.50, and the top 50 newsletters in a category cost about $1. You can cap any run with Apify's maximum cost per run setting, and the scraper stops cleanly when the cap is reached.

Tips

• Use Most popular first to get a newsletter's best-performing posts.
• Use Published on or after to fetch only new posts on a schedule (for example, daily).
• Set Max posts per newsletter to 0 to download the whole archive.
• Paywalled posts include only the free preview Substack shows publicly. They're flagged with isPaywalled and contentIsPreview.

FAQ

Can it scrape paywalled posts? No. It collects only publicly available data. For paid posts you get metadata and the public preview.

Does it collect comments or reader profiles? No. To respect readers' privacy, it doesn't collect comments, Notes or subscriber profiles.

Do I need a Substack account or API key? No.

Is scraping Substack legal? This scraper collects only public information that anyone can see in a browser. You're responsible for how you use the data. Make sure your use complies with Substack's terms, copyright and privacy laws such as GDPR. Don't republish full articles without the author's permission.

Something isn't working? Open an issue on the Issues tab and include the run link. Issues are usually fixed within a few days.