# Substack Scraper – Newsletters, Creators, Posts & Leads (`haketa/substack-scraper`) Actor

Scrape Substack: discover top newsletters by category with author, subscriber count and contact, or pull any publication's posts with full content, reactions, comments and podcast data. Search by category or publication URL. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/haketa/substack-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Haketa](https://apify.com/haketa) (community)
- **Categories:** Lead generation, Social media, News
- **Features:** Limited permissions
- **Stats:** 1 total users, 0 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $1.75 / 1,000 results

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.
Since this Actor supports Apify Store discounts, the price gets lower the higher subscription plan you have.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Substack Scraper — Newsletters, Creators, Posts & Leads

> **The ultimate Substack intelligence and creator lead extraction tool.** This **Substack scraper** extracts data from [Substack](https://substack.com) without login or API keys. Discover **top newsletters across any category** — complete with verified author identities, subscriber counts, monetization status, and contact details — and retrieve **complete publication post archives** including full plain-text articles, engagement metrics (reactions, comments, restacks), and podcast audio feeds. Export seamlessly to **JSON, CSV, Excel, or API**.

[![Apify Actor](https://img.shields.io/badge/Apify-Actor-blue)](https://apify.com/haketa/substack-scraper)
[![Live Data](https://img.shields.io/badge/Data-Live%20at%20Run%20Time-orange)]()
[![Coverage](https://img.shields.io/badge/Substack-Worldwide%20%F0%9F%8C%8F-red)]()
[![Leads](https://img.shields.io/badge/Includes-Author%20%26%20Subscriber%20Counts-brightgreen)]()
[![Engagement](https://img.shields.io/badge/Includes-Reactions%20%26%20Comments-success)]()
[![Export](https://img.shields.io/badge/Export-JSON%20%C2%B7%20CSV%20%C2%B7%20Excel-lightgrey)]()

> Engineered for **growth marketers, sponsorship sales reps, PR and influencer agencies, media analysts, competitive intelligence researchers, and AI/ML engineers feeding long-form text into LLMs and RAG pipelines**.

***

### ⚡ At a glance

| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| **Data source** | Substack global platform directory and public publication archives |
| **Output formats** | JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), XML, RSS, HTML table |
| **Pagination model** | Continuous pagination (unlocks 1,000+ publications and historical posts) |
| **Throughput speed** | ~20–50 posts or newsletter profiles per second |
| **Dual record types** | Publication lead records (`recordType: "publication"`) & Post records (`recordType: "post"`) |
| **Subscriber coverage** | ~96%+ clean numerical subscriber counts extracted from leaderboard metadata |
| **Content extraction** | Full cleaned article plain-text, markdown structure, optional raw HTML |
| **Podcast audio support** | Extracts direct audio stream links and episode duration |
| **Proxy requirements** | Datacenter proxies supported (lightweight HTTP requests, no browser required) |

***

### 🔎 Why scrape Substack?

Substack hosts hundreds of thousands of independent journalists, industry analysts, software engineers, financial researchers, and thought leaders. Its category leaderboards represent the most authoritative, ranked directory of high-influence creators available on the modern web.

However, Substack lacks any official public API or bulk export tooling. Extracting creator contact information or compiling post archives manually requires endless clicking, inspecting individual author bios, and copying engagement numbers into spreadsheets.

This **Substack scraper** bridges this gap. By querying Substack's native endpoints, the actor captures ranked creator rosters across 20+ verticals, resolves subscriber magnitude counts into clean sortable numbers, and downloads full publication archives with complete engagement statistics.

#### High-Value Strategic Applications

- 🧲 **Creator & Influencer Lead Generation**:
  Identify top newsletters in finance, technology, AI, healthcare, and crypto for sponsored placement, newsletter takeovers, and podcast ad sponsorships.
- 📊 **Competitive Benchmarking**:
  Analyze competing industry newsletters to track post frequency, audience engagement ratios (reactions per subscriber), and paid tier monetization adoption.
- 🎙️ **PR & Media Pitching**:
  Build highly targeted media lists of active journalists and subject matter experts covering specific macroeconomic, venture, or cultural themes.
- 🤖 **LLM Training & Knowledge Retrieval (RAG)**:
  Ingest clean, long-form expert essays and domain analyses into vector databases, semantic search engines, and fine-tuning pipelines.
- 📰 **Executive Content Monitoring**:
  Monitor key thought leaders or competitor publications on a recurring schedule to surface breaking industry opinions and emerging commentary.
- 💵 **Creator Economy Market Research**:
  Quantify the growth trajectory of paid publishing models, bestseller badge distributions, and independent publishing economics.

***

### ✨ Features & Capabilities

- ✅ **Category Leaderboard Discovery**: Browse 20+ categories (Technology, Business, Finance, Crypto, Science, News, Culture, Politics, Health, etc.) and extract ranked creator directories.
- ✅ **Clean Numerical Subscriber Counts**: Normalizes vague phrases (`"Over 1,100,000 subscribers"`) into clean numerical values (`1100000`) for instant spreadsheet sorting and threshold filtering.
- ✅ **Full Article Text Extraction**: Captures entire post bodies stripped of boilerplate HTML, formatting code, and navigation elements.
- ✅ **Granular Engagement Metrics**: Retrieves reaction (like) counts, public comment counts, and Substack platform restack (re-share) counts.
- ✅ **Monetization & Badge Tracking**: Identifies paid subscription paywalls, Founding Member options, and Substack Bestseller badges.
- ✅ **Podcast Media Metadata**: Detects audio episodes, extracting episode enclosure URLs and duration timings.
- ✅ **Custom Domain Support**: Seamlessly follows redirects and resolves custom domains (e.g. `astralcodexten.substack.com` → `astralcodexten.com`).
- ✅ **Zero-Config Instant Demo**: Runs out of the box with default category sampling without requiring manual URL inputs.

***

### 📥 Input Parameters

| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| `discoverCategories` | Array | `[]` | Category IDs to discover top newsletters (e.g., `"4"` for Tech, `"62"` for Business, `"153"` for Finance). |
| `publications` | Array | `[]` | List of publication subdomains (e.g., `"astralcodexten"`) or URLs. |
| `postUrls` | Array | `[]` | Direct Substack post URLs (`.../p/...`) to scrape individually. |
| `scrapePosts` | Boolean | `true` | When true, retrieves posts from specified publications. When false, only outputs publication profile leads. |
| `includePostContent` | Boolean | `true` | Extract full article text for each post. Turn off for metadata-only scraping. |
| `includeHtml` | Boolean | `false` | Include raw HTML content in the dataset. |
| `audience` | String | `"all"` | Filter posts by access level (`"all"`, `"free"`, `"paid"`). |
| `maxPostsPerPublication` | Integer | `0` | Max posts per publication. Set to `0` for unlimited historical crawl. Prefill `20`. |
| `maxPublications` | Integer | `0` | Max publications to collect during category discovery. Set to `0` for unlimited. Prefill `50`. |
| `sinceDate` | String | `""` | ISO date string (e.g. `2026-01-01`). Only scrapes posts published on or after this date. |
| `proxyConfiguration` | Object | `{"useApifyProxy": true}` | Apify Proxy settings (datacenter proxies provide top performance). |

***

### 📤 Output Data Fields

The scraper outputs two distinct record types depending on your run configuration: **Publication Leads** (`recordType: "publication"`) and **Post Records** (`recordType: "post"`).

#### 📰 Publication Lead Record Fields

| Field | Type | Coverage | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| `recordType` | String | 🟢 High | Record identifier: `"publication"`. |
| `name` | String | 🟢 High | Title of the publication (e.g., `The Pragmatic Engineer`). |
| `author` | String | 🟢 High | Primary creator or publisher display name. |
| `subscribers` | String | 🟢 High | Clean numerical subscriber count (e.g., `773,000`). |
| `subscribersLabel` | String | 🟢 High | Raw descriptive subscriber badge text. |
| `contactEmail` | String | 🟡 Conditional | Public contact email address when provided by the author. |
| `category` | String | 🟢 High | Category vertical name (e.g., `Technology`, `Finance`). |
| `tagline` | String | 🟢 High | Publication description and mission tagline. |
| `isMonetizing` | Boolean | 🟢 High | Boolean flag indicating active paid subscription tiers. |
| `hasPodcast` | Boolean | 🟢 High | Boolean flag indicating whether the publication hosts podcast audio. |
| `authorBestsellerTier` | String | 🟡 Conditional | Substack badge status (e.g., `Hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers`). |
| `url` | String | 🟢 High | Canonical web URL of the publication. |
| `scrapedAt` | String | 🟢 High | UTC timestamp of record creation. |

#### 📝 Post Record Fields

| Field | Type | Coverage | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| `recordType` | String | 🟢 High | Record identifier: `"post"`. |
| `title` | String | 🟢 High | Headline title of the newsletter post. |
| `subtitle` | String | 🟡 Conditional | Post deck or subtitle summary. |
| `publication` | String | 🟢 High | Name of the hosting newsletter. |
| `author` | String | 🟢 High | Byline author of the post. |
| `postDate` | String | 🟢 High | ISO 8601 publication timestamp. |
| `audience` | String | 🟢 High | Access tier: `"free"`, `"paid"`, or `"founding"`. |
| `reactionCount` | Number | 🟢 High | Total likes/reactions registered on the post. |
| `commentCount` | Number | 🟢 High | Count of public comments submitted on the post. |
| `restackCount` | Number | 🟢 High | Number of Substack restacks (shares across Notes). |
| `wordcount` | Number | 🟢 High | Calculated word count of the article text. |
| `content` | String | 🟢 High | Full plain-text post content (markdown formatted). |
| `audioUrl` | String | 🟡 Conditional | Direct MP3 streaming URL for podcast episodes. |
| `duration` | String | 🟡 Conditional | Duration of the attached audio episode. |
| `url` | String | 🟢 High | Direct permalink to the post. |
| `scrapedAt` | String | 🟢 High | UTC timestamp of record extraction. |

***

### 💻 Sample Output Records

#### Publication Lead Example:

```json
{
  "recordType": "publication",
  "name": "Pragmatic Engineer",
  "subdomain": "pragmaticengineer",
  "url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "author": "Gergely Orosz",
  "tagline": "The #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Big tech and high-growth startups, from the inside.",
  "subscribers": "850,000",
  "subscribersLabel": "Over 850,000 subscribers",
  "contactEmail": "gergely@pragmaticengineer.com",
  "category": "Technology",
  "isMonetizing": true,
  "hasPodcast": true,
  "authorBestsellerTier": "Tens of thousands of paid subscribers",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-10T14:40:00.000Z"
}
```

#### Post Record Example:

```json
{
  "recordType": "post",
  "title": "State of Software Engineering in 2026",
  "subtitle": "Hiring trends, AI code generation in production, and compensation benchmarks",
  "publication": "Pragmatic Engineer",
  "author": "Gergely Orosz",
  "postDate": "2026-10-24T12:00:00.000Z",
  "audience": "free",
  "reactionCount": 1420,
  "commentCount": 215,
  "restackCount": 89,
  "wordcount": 3480,
  "content": "Over the past six months, engineering organizations have reached a pivotal inflection point...",
  "audioUrl": "https://api.substack.com/media/audio/1849201.mp3",
  "duration": "00:42:15",
  "url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-software-engineering-2026",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-10T14:40:05.000Z"
}
```

***

### 🛠️ Step-by-Step API Integration

Integrate Substack intelligence into your automated workflows via Python, Node.js, or cURL.

#### Python Integration

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

## Initialize Apify client
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

## Discover top Finance newsletters for sponsorship outreach
run_input = {
    "discoverCategories": ["153"],  # 153 = Finance
    "scrapePosts": False,            # Only return publication lead profiles
    "maxPublications": 100
}

## Run the actor
run = client.actor("haketa/substack-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

## Print discovered creators
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(f"[{item.get('subscribers')} subs] {item.get('name')} by {item.get('author')} ({item.get('contactEmail')})")
```

#### Node.js Integration

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN',
});

const runInput = {
    publications: ['astralcodexten'],
    maxPostsPerPublication: 25,
    includePostContent: true,
};

const run = await client.actor('haketa/substack-scraper').call(runInput);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

console.log(`Fetched ${items.length} posts.`);
items.forEach(post => {
    console.log(`${post.title} (${post.postDate}) - ${post.reactionCount} likes`);
});
```

#### cURL Execution

```bash
curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/haketa~substack-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "discoverCategories": ["4"],
    "maxPublications": 50,
    "scrapePosts": false
  }'
```

***

### 📚 Complete Category Directory Reference

Select any of the following official Substack category identifiers when setting `discoverCategories` to target specific editorial niches:

| Category ID | Category Name | Typical Content Focus & Lead Demographics |
|---|---|---|
| `4` | **Technology** | AI developments, engineering leadership, software architecture, developer tools |
| `62` | **Business** | Venture capital, startup operating playbooks, SaaS metrics, management |
| `153` | **Finance** | Stock market analysis, macroeconomic forecasting, value investing, commodities |
| `118` | **Crypto** | Blockchain infrastructure, DeFi protocols, Web3 ecosystems, digital assets |
| `134` | **Science** | Biotech, quantum physics, space exploration, longevity and climate tech |
| `103` | **News** | Independent investigative reporting, foreign policy, geopolitical commentary |
| `96` | **Culture** | Digital culture, sociology, trend forecasting, modern internet aesthetics |
| `76739` | **U.S. Politics** | Electoral analysis, legislative reporting, political commentary, policy debate |
| `355` | **Health & Wellness** | Evidence-based nutrition, fitness science, mental health, biohacking |
| `34` | **Education** | Higher ed insights, pedagogical methods, homeschool resources, lifelong learning |
| `11` | **Music** | Album reviews, music industry economics, artist essays, independent releases |
| `109` | **Travel** | Destination guides, remote work dispatch, nomadic lifestyle, regional travel |
| `18` | **History** | Historical deep dives, military strategy, archival retrospectives, biography |
| `114` | **Philosophy** | Ethics, epistemology, classical philosophy, contemporary rationalist thought |
| `223` | **Faith & Spirituality** | Theological discourse, contemplative traditions, spiritual literature |
| `339` | **Literature** | Fiction essays, literary criticism, author interviews, serialized novels |
| `94` | **Sports** | Sports analytics, team commentary, coaching breakdowns, endurance sports |
| `13645` | **Food & Drink** | Culinary techniques, restaurant reviews, cocktail recipes, food industry trends |
| `15414` | **Climate & Environment** | Clean energy transition, environmental policy, ESG analysis, biodiversity |
| `49692` | **Humor** | Satirical commentary, humor essays, comedic serialized writing, cartoons |

***

### 🔄 Automated Workflows & CRM Integrations

Automate your creator research and content pipelines by integrating the Substack Scraper into your modern data stack:

```mermaid
flowchart LR
    A[Substack Scraper] -->|Lead Records| B[Apify Dataset Webhook]
    B --> C{Automation Engine}
    C -->|Creator Leads| D[Airtable / HubSpot CRM]
    C -->|New Article Text| E[OpenAI / Anthropic LLM]
    E --> F[Vector DB / Pinecone / Qdrant]
```

#### Popular Integrations:

1. **Sponsorship Pipeline into Airtable & Notion**:
   Automatically push newly discovered publications into an Airtable outreach base. Filter by `subscribers > 50,000` to alert partnership managers when a fast-growing publication emerges.

2. **RAG & Knowledge Base Synchronization**:
   Trigger an automated embedding workflow whenever an author publishes a new post. The clean plain-text `content` field is ready for chunking without HTML stripping or regex sanitization.

3. **Slack Real-Time High-Engagement Post Alerts**:
   Configure a webhook to notify editorial teams on Slack whenever monitored publications release articles that surpass 1,000 reactions or 200 comments within 24 hours.

***

### 💡 Lead Generation & Scraping Tips

- **Fast Creator Lead Generation**:
  To build sponsorship or PR lists quickly, select multiple target categories in `discoverCategories` and toggle `scrapePosts: false`. This pulls hundreds of high-profile publication profiles with subscriber counts and emails in seconds without downloading historical post archives.
- **RAG & Vector Database Preparation**:
  When preparing documents for LLM ingestion, leave `includePostContent: true` and `includeHtml: false`. The actor's built-in text sanitizer eliminates header/footer noise, providing clean paragraph blocks with word count metrics.
- **Incremental Crawling**:
  Use `sinceDate` (e.g., `"2026-11-01"`) on scheduled weekly runs to only capture posts published after your last update, saving storage and execution time.

***

### ❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

**Does this scraper require a Substack login or account?**
No login, credentials, or cookies are required. The actor gathers data strictly from public leaderboards, public author profiles, and freely available posts.

**Can I scrape paywalled / paid subscriber posts?**
For posts restricted to paid subscribers, Substack serves only a public preview. The actor extracts all publicly readable text, post titles, dates, author bylines, and engagement counts. Full private paywalled content is protected behind authentication.

**How accurate are the subscriber counts?**
Substack displays subscriber counts on category leaderboards and profile banners as tier magnitudes (e.g., `"Over 500,000 subscribers"` or `"500K+"`). The actor extracts and normalizes this figure into a clean numeric string (`500,000`), allowing direct programmatic sorting.

**What categories are available for discovery?**
Over 20 distinct categories are supported, including Technology (`4`), Business (`62`), Finance (`153`), Crypto (`118`), Science (`134`), News (`103`), Politics (`76739`), Health (`355`), Education (`34`), Travel (`109`), History (`18`), Food & Drink (`13645`), and Climate (`15414`).

**How does the scraper handle custom domains?**
Many prominent Substack publications operate on independent domain names (e.g. `pragmaticengineer.com` rather than `pragmaticengineer.substack.com`). The scraper automatically resolves domain redirects and fetches publication metadata seamlessly.

**Can I scrape individual post URLs directly?**
Yes. If you have specific articles you wish to analyze (e.g. `https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-software-engineering-2026`), supply them directly in `postUrls`. The scraper extracts the full article content, metrics, and author details immediately without crawling the rest of the publication.

**How does the scraper handle audio podcasts on Substack?**
For podcast publications, Substack attaches MP3 enclosures and episode runtimes. The actor captures the direct `audioUrl` and formatted `duration` timestamp alongside the show notes text.

**What is the recommended concurrency setting?**
A `maxConcurrency` setting between 4 and 8 provides the optimal balance of high-throughput extraction and network stability when running on Apify Proxy.

**How frequently should I schedule publication monitoring?**
Most active newsletters publish 1–3 times per week. Scheduling a run to trigger twice weekly with `sinceDate` set to 3 days prior will capture all new editorial releases and updated comment counts with minimal compute consumption.

**Can I export data directly to cloud storage (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage)?**
Yes. You can use Apify's native cloud storage integrations or trigger an AWS Lambda function via dataset webhooks upon run completion.

***

### 🔗 Related Creator & Content Scrapers

- [Google Maps Scraper](https://apify.com/haketa/google-maps-scraper) — Extract business leads, phones, and websites across any geographic radius.
- [Trip.com Reviews Scraper](https://apify.com/haketa/trip-com-reviews-scraper) — Hotel reviews, AI translations, and customer ratings.
- [Trustpilot Reviews Scraper](https://apify.com/haketa/trustpilot-reviews-scraper) — Trust ratings and verified customer feedback.
- [Turo Scraper](https://apify.com/haketa/turo-scraper) — Car sharing listings, host leads, and vehicle availability.

***

### 📋 Changelog

- **v1.2 (2026-11)**
  - Unlocked unlimited 1,000+ deep pagination across category leaderboards and publication archives.
  - Standardized zero-config demo execution with fast Technology leaderboard sampling.
  - Enhanced subscriber count normalization and custom domain redirect resolution.
  - Optimized pure HTTP concurrency for sub-30s execution speeds.
- **v1.1 (2026-08)**
  - Added podcast enclosure audio URL and episode duration extraction.
  - Implemented Substack platform restack and comment counter parsing.
- **v1.0 (2026-07)**
  - Initial public launch of Substack newsletter, creator, and post content scraper.

# Changelog

This Actor's version history is a separate document: https://apify.com/haketa/substack-scraper/changelog.md

# Actor input Schema

## `discoverCategories` (type: `array`):

Pick one or more categories to find the top newsletters in them — each result includes the author, subscriber count and contact. Great for creator lead generation and research.

## `publications` (type: `array`):

Substack publications to scrape — a subdomain (e.g. 'astralcodexten'), a full URL (e.g. 'https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com'), or a custom domain. Their posts are collected.

## `postUrls` (type: `array`):

Optional. Individual Substack post URLs (…/p/…) to fetch directly.

## `scrapePosts` (type: `boolean`):

When on, each publication's posts are collected. Turn off to get only the publication's profile (name, author, subscriber count, contact) as a lead.

## `includePostContent` (type: `boolean`):

When on, each post's full text is fetched. Turn off for a faster, lighter list of post metadata only.

## `includeHtml` (type: `boolean`):

Also include the original HTML of each post's content.

## `audience` (type: `string`):

Filter posts by audience.

## `maxPostsPerPublication` (type: `integer`):

Maximum number of posts to collect from each publication. Set 0 for unlimited (all available posts).

## `maxPublications` (type: `integer`):

When discovering by category, the maximum number of publications to return in total. Set 0 for unlimited.

## `sinceDate` (type: `string`):

Optional. Only collect posts published on or after this date, e.g. 2026-01-01.

## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):

Proxy settings. Datacenter proxies (the default) are more than enough.

## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

How many publications/posts to process in parallel. Recommended: 3–8.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "discoverCategories": [],
  "publications": [
    "astralcodexten",
    "https://www.honest-broker.com"
  ],
  "postUrls": [],
  "scrapePosts": true,
  "includePostContent": true,
  "includeHtml": false,
  "audience": "all",
  "maxPostsPerPublication": 20,
  "maxPublications": 50,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  },
  "maxConcurrency": 5
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `datasetItems` (type: `string`):

Download everything collected in this run (JSON, CSV, Excel).

## `runUrl` (type: `string`):

Open this run in the Apify Console.

## `recordType` (type: `string`):

publication or post

## `name` (type: `string`):

Newsletter name (publication records)

## `title` (type: `string`):

Post title (post records)

## `author` (type: `string`):

Author / creator

## `subscribers` (type: `string`):

Subscriber count (publication records)

## `contactEmail` (type: `string`):

Publication contact email, when public

## `category` (type: `string`):

Discovery category

## `tagline` (type: `string`):

Publication tagline

## `publication` (type: `string`):

Source newsletter (post records)

## `postDate` (type: `string`):

Post publish date

## `audience` (type: `string`):

free / paid

## `reactionCount` (type: `string`):

Number of reactions/likes

## `commentCount` (type: `string`):

Number of comments

## `restackCount` (type: `string`):

Number of restacks (shares) on Substack

## `wordcount` (type: `string`):

Post word count

## `content` (type: `string`):

Full post content (plain text)

## `subscribersLabel` (type: `string`):

Subscriber count label

## `isMonetizing` (type: `string`):

Whether the publication has paid subscriptions

## `url` (type: `string`):

Publication or post URL

## `scrapedAt` (type: `string`):

ISO 8601 timestamp

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "discoverCategories": [],
    "publications": [],
    "postUrls": [],
    "maxPostsPerPublication": 20,
    "maxPublications": 50,
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": true
    }
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("haketa/substack-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "discoverCategories": [],
    "publications": [],
    "postUrls": [],
    "maxPostsPerPublication": 20,
    "maxPublications": 50,
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": True },
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("haketa/substack-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "discoverCategories": [],
  "publications": [],
  "postUrls": [],
  "maxPostsPerPublication": 20,
  "maxPublications": 50,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}' |
apify call haketa/substack-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,haketa/substack-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/9v77gr1EzDxKkPGY6/builds/PCwwaWlIHTgeAGeHC/openapi.json